Android was not created in house by Google. The company created Android was using/emulating/whatever the technology that was popular when they created Android. They happened to check out Sun's Java 2 ME (J2ME) which Sun is pushing for small devices. At that time PDA, Windows CE, Symbian devices are popular and many are running or capable of running J2ME apps, just like running Java app on your PC today. J2ME is not just Java, but a complete SDK to build GUI apps.