Wouldn't a real Linux OS on a smartphone be every developer's dream? I will definitely get a Ubuntu phone. Think about the the variety of options you'll have...
However I am not sure if the mainstream market will be as interested.
However I am not sure if the mainstream market will be as interested.
For this group something like Jolla's Sailfish (see http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/) or Ubuntu Mobile will be very appealing options.
Disclaimer: I've worked with some of the people behind both Sailfish and Ubuntu Mobile back in the good old Maemo/MeeGo days.
I wish Canonical luck, but I just don't see my non-technical friends caring one whit about this phone unless it does something extraordinary that they can't get elsewhere. And I just don't see that happening.
You are correct that there's a VM -- Dalvik is the process virtual machine in Android, and that a common use case is to use Java bytecode and then convert it to Dalvik, but this is a far cry from being "trapped in a Java VM".
In fact, at even the fundamental level, the Java VM is a stack-based machine, while the Dalvik VM is a register-based machine (the merits or criticisms of doing so are beyond the scope of this post; that's a different discussion).
And if the notion of a VM is still utterly offensive, you are welcome to write portions of your Android applications in native code, such as through C or C++, although for many applications there's really no or marginal benefit to doing so.
I believe that we are going to be using our phones as our desktop computers in the not-too-distant future, and what Ubuntu is doing is one of the first steps to achieve this. Android has tried to do this in the past (Atrix), but the desktop experience was abysmal because the experiences were inconsistent.
I'm very excited to see how this develops, but Canonical is going to need some good endurance to see this to a point where it can compete commercially.