It's more that a lot of the work people admire was done before or close to the acquisition date and therefore probably should be credited to Sun.

That said, I'm not sure why things like speculative execution in the JVM context get such play as dark magic when it seems like the JVM and CLR are pretty neck-and-neck in terms of deliverable performance when we get down to the level where we're not affected by larger architectural differences.

There are a lot of different ways to get high performance code from a VM environment. But to hear many people tell it the JVM is the only competent one. I'm just not sure the evidence bears that out.