>>17
Completely wrong. Having a VM is irrelevant, and clearly unnecessary for mobile software, as the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW, etc. all demonstrate. Having the Java VM even more so; they wrote their own!
I'll tell you why they chose Java. It's because Android is going after the J2ME market, and so they want to pull all those developers over to Android. They figured the best way to do that is to give them the same old programming language so they have an easier time adapting to it and porting their apps.
It's also because they made the decision in 2005, where there weren't really any other serious compiled languages than C and C++. (There almost still isn't; not much has changed in that regard.)