FFS... When you plan to buy a house, do you look at what is available on the market now, or do you look at futuristic designs that MIGHT come in 30 years?
When you buy a car, do you look at the cars there are now on the market, or the cars that will fly?

The Java/VM/JIT being faster than native code with the right tweaks is the biggest bunch of crap ever. How can someone sane believe that compiled code can't do the same stuff that VM/JIT code does? You never heard of stuff such as:
if(platform)do_platform_optimized_stuff();?
Or: If(have_sse)do_sse(); else do_non_sse();

There is NOTHING faster than native code (preferably well written ASM code). When you have the runtime code doing stupid stuff like garbage collection or enforcing array limits, there is a big speed penalty. Remember, the fastest code is the code that is not executed.
There is absolutely no reason for garbage collection, except to accommodate lazy/newbie programmers. Same with not using pointers because omfg, they are evil.