Previously, it was any new implementation of the VM...
Until the current crop of JVM based languages showed up my interest in the Java the language waned. But now that you can use your language of choice and still tap into JVM libraries, perf and the high quality profiling tools, the JVM is compelling again.
Also experience stories like this, http://blog.urbanairship.com/blog/tag/java/, show that as great as Python and Ruby are for building websites, surprise, surprise, they don't have the performance for the real-time web.
A while ago I rewrote a system from Java (that used JBoss Netty) to node.js. The node.js solution used about 10x less memory. And memory is a crucial element of scaling real-time web applications.
Building your own competing JVM can, as this suit demonstrated, get you sued too.