In some ways I love the piano, in others, I don't. I finished 8th grade piano when I was 14, but shortly after my hands clunked out with a pretty awful bout of RSI :/ couldn't even write for about 4 months, and after that, only painfully.
The interesting thing is, as soon as I stopped playing piano, I started learning -music-. Playing piano was actually giving me too narrow a focus on the technicalities of the instrument and I guess I was doing nothing to actually try to "understand" classical music outside the mechanics of piano music. Over the next few years I composed and read textbooks on harmony and suchlike, and actually became much more of a mature musician in that time than I'd ever been, and now I absolutely love classical to death, whereas before I was bored and bewildered by it.
In the last few months I've been able to play again, which means I can apply all I've learnt post-RSI to the piano, giving me a more musically-minded approach. So on one hand, learning an instrument can make you forget about what music actually is (NOT a bunch of rote-learnt technical exercises), but if you make yourself read and read and read about harmony and all the other theory, you will absolutely adore the instrument. Works for me