My point being, he cited a lot of example that would have been no slower in Java.

this what happens when you start believing into "megahertz and gigabytes are cheap".

As I say to the people I work with all the time, yes computational power is cheap, but it's cheap for everyone, our competitors included. The ability to throw raw power at a problem is not a competitive advantage.

As an aside, I wish CS was taught like that. "You are never going to need to write your own sort ever, but we are going to teach you about sorting so you understand that smart algorithms always beat brute force. Pay attention."

My personal opinion of Java is that its shortcomings were either necessary for or worth putting up with for a world of applications on demand running on heterogenous client devices (i.e. the original applet vision). Now that it's mainly used in known environments (i.e. your own servers) it has to compete on its merits alone, and that's where it struggles. But I really don't mind if other people want to shackle themselves to it :-)

The same may not apply for other projects. I for one spend most of my time worrying about IO, availability and how to best take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores. In this, C++ isn't exactly giving developers anything for free (concurrency still not even being part of the language).

As for Java on mobile: there are projects that are going that route. I'd wait and see before I postulated whether this is a good idea or not.

I don't really understand how Vista fits into this discussion at all. In my opinion, Vista is the result of developers being paralyzed by the sheer weight of their legacy code and interoperability with legacy code. Completely different issue.

I'm sure you've seen "Java: Please Wait..." on tiny mobile screens with famous Java logo (cup of coffee). I am yet to run into "Please Wait: Objective-C..." screen on the iPhone.