I think that retooling with Python would be such a huge undertaking that they could not do it. Not so much for their own software, but lets face there are ~100,000 Java apps out there for android now.

It would be interesting if they could do either of:

- Switch to use the GPL version of Java and be fully conformant with the java specs. This presumably would hurt performance unless they could do some miracle engineering to obviate the reasons Dalvik exists. Perhaps though, as phones get more powerful it's not so important.

- Keep Dalvik but work around whatever ip violations Oracle is successful in claiming. They probably believe they have already done this.

What is important for a phone platform is what's on top, not what's on bottom. Android can compete with iPhone because of the high level stuff Google provided--the Linux at the bottom is pretty much irrelevant.

Most Linux phones, other than Android and WebOS, run crappy top level stuff written by the device manufacturers. Rarely, a device manufacturer does come up with something that is not crap to put on top of the kernel, but even then they can't compete with iPhone because they lack the infrastructure, like app stores that can attract significant developer interest.

By all accounts I've seen, WebOS is a great platform, and failed because of marketing and hardware, not software.