Many great things are built off the experience of earlier efforts. But I think a point from the discussion is that C# was a huge leap forward and has progressed further and faster than Java. The two languages have been an interesting case-study in two very different ways to design and support a language.

It may have originally started as a copy of Java but its evolution has been quite separate mostly because it made the jump to parametric polymorphism at a point where they could break backwards compatibility and fork the standard library.

C# was inspired from Java*