Lots of programmers that shouldn't have compiler permits enter the market every year to participate in huge projects that happen to be written in Java because the C[ITEO]O decided it's "enterprisey" enough and the consultancy opted for it in the proposal because they could hire inexperienced Java folks cheaper than they could hire inexperienced Smalltalkers or Lispers and all the Perl, Ruby and Python folks refused to wear neck ties.
You can't build a F1 car or a space vehicle without amazing tools, but you can draw a striking picture or play beautiful music with the most humble of implements.
Android has Dalvik, which is a register-based virtual machine (as compared to the stack-based JVM) that's optimized for solid-state memory (which has slower access times) and with bytecode optimized for interpreting on ARM processors. I's questionable if it was the right thing to do, but it's still amazing.
Having a VM on a mobile device is debatable, but it's higher level and that's one way to achieve portability and to reduce accidental errors (memory leaks, buffer overflows).
And what language would you propose they should use? Their own? C#? And keep in mind that it has to be a language that doesn't need lots of magic to make it run efficiently, like a tracing JIT (a pragmatic choice based on current real-world constraints).
Your analogy to cars doesn't hold water. You can't build an F1 without proper knowledge, and all the tools in the world won't help you with that.
And while I hate Java the language, only shortsighted developers blame the language for their lack of skill. You're not primarily an artist, you're an engineer so get over it ;)
Android's development model is also proprietary, so its quality has got nothing to do with open-source.
The title of this article is "open source is stupid". I beg to differ, this article is stupid.