Microsoft are playing catch-up (Score 1)

What Microsoft have done is to concede that virtual machine architectures are the only way forward for enterprise development on Windows. They tried ActiveX/COM/COM+ as a way to do distributed development. That failed.

Microsoft won't back down from .NET any time soon, so comparing the architectures is absolutely valid.

It took Sun years to get Java to the stage where a VM is considered to be a good way of deploying programs. .NET has at least got them to move forward with technologies like JAX-RPC.