J. Gosling's point isn't entirely clear to me, either. I came away with the impression that Oracle is a difficult company to deal with. Perhaps he's trying to draw a line between Oracle being difficult and Apple deciding they no longer want to do their own port. I supposes that's possible.

Still, it seems more likely that Apple decided that the cost of maintaining the Java port on OS X simply wasn't worth it. In the same manner that they decided that nobody wanted to use Flash on their smart-phones, they've decided that nobody wants to use Java on their laptops or workstations.