It's hard to love, I agree, but if you were designing something like Android from scratch now what language would you choose? I'm having a hard time thinking of reasonable alternatives. In the long run I'd like to see something like Go or Kotlin become options but really they're too left field right now.
Javascript would be an obvious choice for anything centered around creating UIs. Palm-now-HP's nice WebOS platform is essentially a recent direct competitor to Android and did that.
I really don't think a dynamically typed language is desirable as the primary development language for a mobile platform. Static typing is just too useful and makes it a lot easier to optimize too. Java is still quite a bit faster than JS.
Something like Kotlin seems like a good choice to me, if it takes off.
