It would be something other than JS... ;-)

Your point is well taken; I know some who hate JS because, well, it's JS. I doubt Google is trying to cater to THAT crowd as such, but if Gilad Bracha is involved in it I think it will at least be worth looking at.

Maybe it's about more than just the language. Have you actually seen a Smalltalk development environment? (e.g. http://vimeo.com/27850933 ).

Maybe in much the same way as CoffeeScript differs from JS. It doesn't need to be that much different to be better. Of course this depends on how you define "better" and "different."