I think what exacerbated the situation was that when RIM announced the development kit for the new playbook, they led with the AIR kit, with no defined date for when they'll get Java on there. Which is probably good news for Flash developers, but doesn't look good if Java is your tool of choice.
Now, while RIM has brutally chopped the price of a dev licence (down to something ridiculous like $5 or $10), and they are giving away the dev kit, the tools you need (from Adobe) cost (if memory serves) about $8-900.
The good news is, if you happen to know what you're doing, you can take your Flash app and use some free command line tools to go and wrap it up. So you don't _need_ to spend that big chunk of change on Adobe products... you can trade off your own misery for it instead.
It seems a really raw deal for the Java devs, but if RIM can replace their lost Java devs with Flash devs they might consider that a decent trade-off.