> oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

Apple (or more, exactly, the part from NeXT) did initially bet a lot on Java adoption. They ported the entire WebObjects stack from ObjC to Java, only to watch the technology get abandoned by those in the banking and eCommerce communities. The conversion was so total that when the Cocoa-To-Java bridge in OS X was deprecated, it was no longer possible to continue using the original WO tool chain. (What WO development outside of Apple exists made a new chain based on Eclipse, from what I read.)

No, if they "dragged their feet" it was simply because Java's static OO-ness doesn't map well to Objective-C's fully dynamic nature. Objective-C is basically just Smalltalk semantics (minus control structures) bolted on to C.

It works surprisingly well, but you can't and won't believe it until you try it yourself.

That's inconsistent with how quickly Apple had Carbon ready using C. Just a matter of effort.

Carbon is a port of C APIs from the classic mac mostly. On top of that, Objective-C is ultimately C, and its easier to talk between the two than Java.