This is very true. And any language to language transfomation is going to have some impedance mismatch. Nonetheless, it does not follow that since JVM was built specifically for Java, the impedance mismatch of Lisp -> JVM would result in a less expressive lisp than Lisp -> C or Lisp to x86. There are many variants of lisps and clojure is not specially disadvantaged due to targeting the JVM.

I think x86 is pretty strongly targeted to C, actually.

x86 is aimed at Pascal and other stack-based languages.

The processor had some new instructions (not present in the 8080 and 8085) to better support stack based high level programming languages such as Pascal and PL/M; some of the more useful ones were push mem-op, and ret size, supporting the "pascal calling convention" directly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8086