The JVM bytecode is shitty. It cannot support dynamic languages at the VM level (yet: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292), the support for the C# equivalent of structs has been pushed back, and that makes any kind of hardware acceleration painful. Then theres type erasure - a total hack to get generics.

I think Oracle is being beyond stupid here. If anyone has the power to come up with a language and toolchain to make Java utterly irrelevant, its Google.