Azul is a great innovator in the JVM space, and I think their innovation will start to trickle down to other VM based languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript etc. They've already open sourced some of their innovations: http://www.managedruntime.org
Not so much in vms and more in beating current operating systems into actually working for the applications. I think a few other language vms had the same issue but instead of trying to beat Linux into usability they used bare hardware via qemu.
