Anyone who is really interested in a mature, industrial strength, system programming language without the fundamental flaws of C have been able to crank up an Ada compiler for years (including the free, GNU licensed GNAT compiler). And along the way there have been a lot of other solid options that have been used to build reliable systems (personally, I think Modula-3 should have gotten a lot more love than it did, especially since it had a free compiler as well...alas).

The reality is, there's a bunch of people who spend a lot of time furiously wanking over the NextCoolLanguage du jour, espousing how it's obviously going to displace C and cure all our ills, while the people who are actually writing things people use are by-and-large content to keep doing it in C. If the people that really matter in this debate wanted a better language than C, they'd have picked one a long time ago.