Touche, I clearly didn't fully understand your original statement. You're entirely correct in this case.
So we finally reaching the point where batch and interactive jobs are clearly separated because the very different tradeoffs they need. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h... indeed.
That's what I was alluding to in the parenthetical. According to the paper, C4 trades off a significant amount of throughput for reduced latency. That's what you want for many applications, and C4 is a great advance for those apps, but throughput is very important for most workloads, so HotSpot's GC ends up yielding a good balance.