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if ZFS or DTrace were ever ported to Linux

This is done (largely). Sun was hired to do the block layer port. The POSIX implementation is independent.

(..) it's a crime that it hasn't been ported to Linux

http://zfsonlinux.org/

(I am expecting the answer to be legal rather than technical/no one's gotten around to it)

Stupid licensing issues.
There's always a way around technical stuff: http://zfsonlinux.org/

I was aware of this, but mountable filesystems are still only in a release candidate so it's some way from being usable. Also you do need to compile it yourself due to legal issues if it's distributed with Linux: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

Sun had good reasons for reasons for going with the CDDL, and Oracle has equally good reasons for sticking with it.

Yes, keeping Linux out on purpose:

In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that"

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg

the fact that nobody bothers doing this

http://zfsonlinux.org/

On the other hand, if you're hellbent on Linux and not too invested in the kernel

That makes no sense. Linux _is_ the kernel. Do you mean GNU?

Unfortunately, Lustre-on-ZFS is substantially faster that lustre on ext3, mainly because ZFS combines the features of an lvm and a filesystem. That eliminates the need to have SAN appliance heads managing the storage and provides some additional data integrity features. It's cheaper too.