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Java Desktop
Over 91% of Internet-connected PCs have Java enabled (Source: Omniture, April 2007).
This includes over 63% of Sun JRE in the US, and over 65% of Sun JRE in Italy/Spain/UK (Nielsen//NetRatings, January 2007)

92% (and growing) of JRE installs (Java.com, J.S.C.) are now Java SE 6 (April 2007, Sun)

Estimated Worldwide Java SE penetration per Operating System and VM vendor (Source: Sun estimate, April 2007)

* Sun JRE (Windows): 65%
* Microsoft VM (Windows): 21%
* Apple VM (Mac OS): 3.5%
* Other (including Java SE on Linux and other OS: 1.5%
PC OEMS representing over 60% of all shipped PCs in Q4 2006 have signed Java SE redistribution agreements with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

9 of the top 10 PC OEM vendors have a JRE redistribution agreement with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

which I believe it is better than GWT, although not entirely similar (much better than echo2 though).

That is a REALLY long post to write without knowing what you're talking about.

(mildly flamey right back at you :p)

Okay, okay, some substance to my post:

You talk about "this sort of thing" and "this sort of stuff", which shows pretty clearly that you haven't used Groovy.

I've used Groovy. I don't really like it, but I use Ant heavily at work, and you run into Ant's limitations very quickly. Being able to use Groovy from within Ant - once you're already within an environment that heavily uses Ant for automation, etc. - is about as elegant as Ant or Java get, and I'm grateful for its existance. See also the excellent Canoo Webtest, which with Groovy support lets you do things you'd find extremely difficult in any other web testing tool. Granted, these are fairly specialized uses, but that's already two only in my limited experience... and it does fill a useful niche in the Java world.

Your comparison to "C (in it's range of distinct flavors), Java, ASP, PHP, Perl, VB.NET" or "C, Java and Perl/PHP - or say C++/C#, VB.NET and ASP" is REALLY missing the point. I wouldn't be so proud of your 5-digit Slashdot ID if you don't take the time to know what you're talking about before going on a long rant.

Not just possible, but it works and has been shipping for a while by Canoo.

Check out Canoo WebTest. This is my favorite tool for the kind of high-level functional testing you're talking about (assuming your app is a web app).

We use Canoo WebTest, which is a very nice extension to HTTPUnit. We used to use Cruise Control for automated builds, but replaced it with Gump from Apache Jakarta as it seems to do a better job. We have been having a lot of trouble, however, trying to get the Canoo web tests integrated as part of the automated Gump builds, as it is very difficult to get all of our servers to shut down reliably every time the tests are done.