The real Linux aspect is definitely something that many developers find appealing. I still meet a lot of hackers who couldn't think of using anything else than the ageing Nokia N900. Hardware keyboard, Debian packaging, root out of the box, ...

For this group something like Jolla's Sailfish (see http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/) or Ubuntu Mobile will be very appealing options.

Disclaimer: I've worked with some of the people behind both Sailfish and Ubuntu Mobile back in the good old Maemo/MeeGo days.

Developers are a small percentage of the overall market. Sure, we might think it's cool because it's running Ubuntu. But the vast majority of the population is going to look at it and say "How is this going to make my mobile experience better in a way that I don't already have from IOS or Android?"

I wish Canonical luck, but I just don't see my non-technical friends caring one whit about this phone unless it does something extraordinary that they can't get elsewhere. And I just don't see that happening.

It would not be my dream. But I don't like writing POSIX software anyway, so perhaps I am not a developer?

hmm, meego was 'real' linux. I had it on a tablet. It was horrible :). Intel gave every developer one in an event. I think the next day everyone had installed a different OS :)

Android is a real Linux

Android does use the linux kernel and does have some of the GNU stack, but it's not directly comparable to Ubuntu.

I believe that we are going to be using our phones as our desktop computers in the not-too-distant future, and what Ubuntu is doing is one of the first steps to achieve this. Android has tried to do this in the past (Atrix), but the desktop experience was abysmal because the experiences were inconsistent.

I'm very excited to see how this develops, but Canonical is going to need some good endurance to see this to a point where it can compete commercially.

Trapped in a Java VM

It is no such thing.

You are correct that there's a VM -- Dalvik is the process virtual machine in Android, and that a common use case is to use Java bytecode and then convert it to Dalvik, but this is a far cry from being "trapped in a Java VM".

In fact, at even the fundamental level, the Java VM is a stack-based machine, while the Dalvik VM is a register-based machine (the merits or criticisms of doing so are beyond the scope of this post; that's a different discussion).

And if the notion of a VM is still utterly offensive, you are welcome to write portions of your Android applications in native code, such as through C or C++, although for many applications there's really no or marginal benefit to doing so.