Ultimately what happened to Java was the same thing that would have happened to any other dominant language that the industry uses to build heavy duty enterprise software: stuff like ORM frameworks, data transfer objects, servlet containers, some kind of web integration like JSP, RPC frameworks, SOAP, REST, etc.
Would it be easier or better to do that stuff in Lisp? Maybe. But not by a huge amount. The beauty of the language would certainly end up being obscured by the boring, complex, practical work that we would all be doing with it. And most programmers would not be better than they are now -- instead they would force an imperative model on top of whatever substrate they are given, just like they do today.