Amazon uses a custom JVM on Kindle devices and they paid a per-device licensing fee to Sun (and I assume they still do to Oracle). If I recall, this is actually how Sun used to handle their licensing; if you had a completely standards compliant implementation then you didn't have to pay licensing fees, but if you have any sort of custom VM that ran java (even if it was a strict subset or superset) you had to get them to agree to licensing terms.

Maybe I'm off base, but it seems like just because he made a statement that he was happy to see that they were going to use a java-based VM doesn't mean he didn't assume that they were going to pay licensing fees for it.