[citation][nom]Smochina[/nom]Excuse you? Java is the worst possible thing ever. Memory hungry, slow as hell. Yea, smart choice Google, and about stability, pffff.Let me give you a quote from John Carmack about a IDE made in Java "when a text editor is anything but instant on a 3 GHz machine..."[/citation]
I think your gripes are with the Java Virtual Machines, not Java itself. Android is highly optimized for Java, so it runs almost natively. I'm also guessing that you haven't actually used an Android phone. I have a Droid and the thing has been rock stable and speedy since I've owned it. I really don't see how a memory hungry and slow as hell OS could make it to market in this customer driven world, let alone gain more market share than the iPhone.
As for the difference between Android and ChromeOS. ChromeOS, when you get down to it, is a web browser that runs at the hardware level. You turn on the computer and boom, you've got a web browser up instead of an OS loading screen and desktop. This browser is a bit more robust than a typical browser. It lets you run apps within it. It's almost entirely cloud based and doesn't really let you install stuff or save stuff to an internal HDD (I think the devices in the future will have something like 4GB SSDs), making a very niche OS for people who really only do stuff on the internet like web browsing and Google Docs and music/video streaming.