Gregg Sporar has a look at "Beyond Java", and has a few caveats. They aren't bad ones, and I think they illustrate something:

The bigger limitation to keep in mind, though, is that Tate's conclusions may not apply to you. This is from page 43: "I'd guess that as many as half of all commercial applications involve a web frontend that baby-sits a plain old relational database." I don't necessarily disagree with his guess, but here's the key thing to understand: Tate makes his living building those sorts of applications. So when he describes the pain that Java forces him to endure in order to build systems for his clients, you have to ask yourself: "Does this apply to me?"

It appears that in Tate's view, most Java developers are like him: building web front ends that do create/read/update/delete operations on a relational database, with perhaps some additional business logic. And while I don't dispute that a large proportion of Java developers are building those sorts of applications, not everyone makes their living that way.

His central point is that Java has drifted away from serving the needs of developers such as himself. The addition of enterprise features and frameworks has added complexity that is not needed by the majority of applications and therefore just ends up making developers less productive. It is important to note that he disdains the use of Java for rich client applications. Also of note is that development of mobile applications gets very little mention in the book.

I think the bigger issue is that Java - and the MS offerings - and a lot of what IBM is selling, for that matter - are outside the bounds of what most developers are doing. I don't think most people are heads down on huge, enterprise class, "scale to the heavens" projects. And yet, the mainstream tools are mostly catering to that audience. A lot of the interest in things like Ruby on Rails and Seaside is driven by that mis-direction - the big vendors are busy handing out complex machinery for building an interstate system, while most of the developers need to put in a sidewalk.