For a long time I thought that way, but Java has a killer feature that everything else is missing: it's really hard to write java extensions in C/C++, and thus it's near-impossible to crash your runtime. I think that combined with its C-like syntax was always going to ensure Java's success in the enterprise.

The other thing that makes it good for large systems is that Java was designed from the ground up for running untrusted code. I know the python module that attempted to offer the same functionality has been abandoned as basically unworkable. (Though interestingly this is one of the things that Tcl did well - safe Tcl actually worked, afaik).