Are there standard benchmarks used to measure and compare the two approaches (jvm vs .net)?
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/csharp.html
.NET does better in most of them, but falls down vs Java on Regex and k-nucleotide
But you can show the differences qualitatively, in that the .NET simply doesn't have large swathes of optimisations which I think are considered pretty fundamental in the JVM such as escape analysis.