It does compete with Java, as both are garbage collected. C, C++ and Fortran are in their own category because they don't have to deal with the indirection of boxed heap objects.

The mythical "sufficiently smart complier" can remove these indirections, but no current compiler can do it perfectly, as doing so requires generative the copious amounts of object code that C++ is so roundly criticized for (templates). GHC is pretty good at removing these indirections. I understand C# compilers are as well. I've not used Java much but isn't there some issue where you can't store primitive integers in a collection because they don't inherit from the base Object type and/or the JVM doesn't support unboxed objects?* This is the same kind of annoyance you have to deal with in Haskell to get fast-as-possible performance (i.e. using types which are not polymorphism-friendly thus decreasing code reuse and increasing verbosity) so in that way I think they are equal with regards to the performance/brevity trade-off.

* I'm sure this has probably been fixed in some recent version of Java but it's still illustrative of why garbage collection imposes a real performance impact that C and C++ just don't have to deal with.