I disagree. When you're just starting out all this software you have to install is really discouraging. Plus some people don't own their personal computers and use the computers at school etc so it's much better for them if there was a portable development environment.

> getting started in Java programming

I'm willing to guess that's where things got hard, not installing and running an app. Would you know what to do when NetBeans throws you in front of an empty text editor? Or, when starting a new project, did you know the canonical way of naming things without being shown once?