If I was to design a CS101 course, I'd do away with Java (which is the language of choice at my university) as well. I don't know what would be the replacement; vala looks nice but the resources are lacking. My main points in choosing a language to teach would be that I can do OO in it while not needing everything to be encapsulated in classes. Also, the language shouldn't care about whitespace, because if I'm teaching a few hundred students, I'm not going to debug a boatload of mixed tabs and spaces issues.
Also, my CS101 course would be about debugging as much as about programming. Including stuff like "here is some source code, that's the observed bug, submit a corrected version by midnight x-y-zzzz and describe how you debugged it in bullet points". Unfortunately, plagiarism on these types of assignments makes them very much useless in the real world where grades depend on that.