From the other perspective too, Google clearly seemed to want the flexibility to change the details of Android architecture on a "whim", seeming to settle on the Linux kernel at the last minute and expecting to support both ARM and x86 and whatever else they felt they wanted. Google's focus on the JVM/Dalvik and making Native hard in Android seems quite intentional, forcing developers to cross-develop in a different way by obfuscating as much code as possible into a virtual machine that they could 100% control abstracted from underlying architecture and even kernel.