>>for practical purposes you're fully tied to the JVM and the java runtime libs.
That's more like a positive thing about Clojure. Java inter-op and targeting the JVM gives Clojure a great chance of adoption at large enterprises.
These days no one really has a issue installing jars on a production machine.
Common Lisp user here. I was also disappointed in the same way when trying Clojure.
Other minor things i didn't like was the noisy [] on the syntax, and the fact that for practical purposes you're fully tied to the JVM and the java runtime libs.