Dalvik is also very similar to the JVM in a number of ways. For instance the instruction set maps almost 1:1 to bytecodes:

  OP_MONITOR_ENTER vs monitorenter
  OP_INVOKE_STATIC vs invokestatic  
  OP_THROW vs athrow  
  OP_CHECK_CAST vs checkcast  
  OP_ARRAY_LENGTH vs arraylength  
  OP_NEW_ARRAY vs anewarray  
  ...

If the question is "Dalvik was designed to run code written in what language?" the answer is "Java" without any doubt. This might be important to some legal question, whether Google created it with the specific intention to not pay license fees or something, or whether they broke a license for J2SE (they use Java a lot) that prohibits them from creating incompatible versions of Java.