Okay, let me put down a few words on this (disclaimer: these are my personal thoughts, no idea about Intel/Nokia policies, etc, etc).

For the tl;dr people: If you believe the promises of a VM, you've been suckered

It's the typical case "if I don't see the problem, it doesn't exist !". Java programmers should know better - sure, Java has been mostly compatible, but the key word is MOSTLY. There have been plenty of breaks, both binary and source. Dalvik has had the luck of being fairly new and not overly widespread until the past 2 years, so it came with little baggage - but it has baggage now, so any promise 'current Android apps will work on all future Android devices' is marketing talk - it's something to make you feel cosy and comfortable. The idea is that if the changes are small and infrequent enough, you will be forgiving as your time investment is huge, and in reality, nobody runs 10+ years old binary blobs except for retro-IT nerd creds and banks stuck with cobol code anyway. However, wrt to this discussion it's the same thing - it doesn't matter if I have to recompile because of a tiny Dalvik API deprecation, or because of a huge CPU architectural shift. And to appeal to the compiler geek crowd - it's not like C++ can't be translated into bytecode - it's just that it didn't make sense so far, architectures and extensions shifted so fast that your code grew obsolete faster than the architecture changes (think about that one).

Additional disclaimer: My favorite programming language is Python, was a Java guy a while back but nowadays I do C++ based Qt sprinkled with QML.

I personally know guys in a team who are working on the MIPS port of MeeGo. It's fairly underground as MIPS does not have any wildly popular public reference boards or hardware, but rest assured, MeeGo exists for far more architectures than you think.