Java is the natural place that people flee to when they can't cope with memory management and pointers.
This is very negative (and wrong) statement. Java is a natural place for people to work when they don't need to actively pursue the issues you outline above. C and C++ are both strong languages, Java is another in a evolutionary step. It is a well-designed language that simplifies many of the processes that developers previously had to constantly be on the alert for. This may appear to the hard-core crowd to be an abdication of duty, but Java's acceptance in the development world is validation that large programs are about strong design and ease of maintenance. The Java language implementation achieves this in a way that C/C++ doesn't easily do.
I'd not want to write an operating system in Java as much as I'd write a large enterprise sized app in C (And yes, I'm sure you could give examples of the latter, but I was speaking about weather you would WANT to do it).
