Here's a petition for patent reform:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/direct-patent-office-cease-issuing-software-patents/vvNslSTq

Java is faster then C++ for any non trivial use case. This is because of 2 reasons:
- It compiles more natively then C++: C++ is compiled for just "Windows", while Java is hotspot compiled at runtime (where necessary, after a startup delay) to "Windows XP SP3 Intel processor".
- A garbage collector is faster for non-trivial use cases then malloc because it can free entire chunks of memory at once. When someone walks into your living room with muddy shoes, it's more efficient to mop the entire room then it is to clean only the footprints with a toothbrush.

As a planning solving programmer, I 've seen this in practice.
Planning problems are problems that run for hours and do virtually no IO, they simple take up all the CPU power and evaluate an exponential of billions solutions.

Real-world use case performance competitions prove that Java implementations are faster then C++ implementations:
- Terrabyte sort benchmark: http://sortbenchmark.org/
- International timetabling competition: http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/

Java does have downsides over C++: it has a terrible warmup time and it loves to grab and hold lots of RAM, because garbage collectors work faster with more RAM. So in use cases like gedit/kate/jedit where startup time is more important than performance, I'd stick with C++.

The Java quick starter plugin is a good thing. Finally Java is doing the same trick as Flash in your browser: start up in the background along with your browser, so when you see a Java applet on a webpage it doesn't take 5 to 20 seconds to show up. They should have done this 10 years ago. If you don't like Java, maybe you shouldn't be installing Java? :)

As a developer I've considered this one of the (if not the) most important issue in linux. I am happy to hear it's finally getting the attention it needs. Many applications (especially games) will only be released for linux (and work out-of-the-box without tweaking), once there is a decent way to build 1 release for any (LSB compliant) linux distro. I myself build java applications (on Ubuntu) that work perfectly fine on linux, but because of this problem, I simply don't bother building a release package for linux. No matter how hard is, get it done. And make an extensive test kit to assure Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell are compatible.