Agreed, I would not yet reccommend Java for an application that reads/writes from a hard drive a few thousand times a minute, or does *serious* number cruching, or does a lot of 'hardware' controls. Altho you might spend less in the long run by just writing a Java program and buying more hardware power, compared to writing, performance tuning and debugging C++ code. If developer time counts as a 'cost' . . . Java code writes and debugs in about half the time as C++, so the end-result is the C++ program costs far more.
But for client/server, rich-client distributed software . . . Java is the *only* sensible choice.