"x86 is an architecture hobbled by its legacy ISA, the CPUs are immensely complex VM-like dynamic beasts that hide the real CPU to get performance out of it" is one of those tropes that's inaccurate enough to have a small cottage industry of online pieces explaining the wrong bits. You can probably find highly rated SO answers or HN comments about it.

The long and the short of it is, an x86 cpu is not really VM-like and a JVM is decidedly unCPU like. The analogy only works if you generalize it so much it becomes a uselessly mushy tautology or you ignore basic aspects of how each of these things work.