I agree - it's not, at the moment, an ideal end user situation. Even though the build process was reasonably easy, a fair few GUI programs won't run (though mostly every command line app seems to work fine). Most importantly for my test, Eclipse was OK.

The main point of the test was to see how close the system was to being even usable. Considering Apple have maintained the OS X Java for a decade, I expected there to be no alternative that was even vaguely close to running "Hello World", let alone running something as complex as Eclipse. Instead, it worked pretty damn well, and (modulo licensing), I suspect even I could package up the results into a DMG that 95% of people could use to, i.e., build Android apps. More than that, consider the worst case scenario for OS X Java...

1) Apple don't ship anything with 10.7; 2) Oracle don't ship anything, nor do IBM; 3) Getting old versions of Apple Java running is impossible

Then, the real community experts have a nearly whole year of lead time (until Summer 2011, the earliest Lion ships) to convert what already limps along quite well into a decent Java SE SDK and runtime experience. This seems well within the grasp of them. Of course, if the community doesn't step up because it's not interested, then that rather makes the point that Java on OS X just isn't relevant any more.