Lots of other good arguments have been posted, but I'd like to say something to the teaching aspect. In high school, we had four years of Java. I already knew most of the curriculum at the start, so others would sometimes ask me for help with assignments. Quite a few times, even after years of school, I'd run into people being confused by classes, instances, what curly braced blocks meant on a class vs on a control statement...

You could say the class should've been taught better, or that the students just weren't good enough, but I think a good tool (programming language) should help users, not be a barrier to overcome. Programming in Java doesn't require too many concepts, but you have to start with all of them at once, and I think some students just never got over that initial step.

It's of course debatable whether another language would have been better or whether Java really contributed to the problem, but I think we can agree there are languages that better lend themselves to teaching complete beginners.