This is very true. And any language to language transfomation is going to have some impedance mismatch. Nonetheless, it does not follow that since JVM was built specifically for Java, the impedance mismatch of Lisp -> JVM would result in a less expressive lisp than Lisp -> C or Lisp to x86. There are many variants of lisps and clojure is not specially disadvantaged due to targeting the JVM.