This might be my ignorance of virtual machines, but what prevents vm authors to compile bytecode into asm??
The advantage of bytecode is that it can run on any operating system/architecture, the VM will take care of executing it as binary code on whatever system it is installed on. This way you can go to youtube from any OS and if you have flash installed it works. Its not just about compiling into binary and startup times :)...
Now having said that when are the iPhone ruby and python VMs coming out?
Which means if you want to install a JVM or Flash VM you need to install the VM onto iPhone apple won't let you. If you compile the Java bytecode into C-code (as GCJ does) you still have the problem of actually installing that compiled code onto the iPhone.