"Although the .NET vs. Java war is basically over for control of the Windows desktop, where .NET is sure to become the managed language of choice for new Windows desktop applications, there is a new battle brewing.  That battle is for the Linux desktop.  Now that Java has been open sourced under the GPL, even the most strict of the 'free software only' distributions can start bundling it and integrating it into their Linux distributions out of the box." 

"I share the sentiment about the GTK bindings. [...]  lately the new maintainers have started a rewrite which seems very closely coupled to GNOME.  Might be worth informing them that really a lot of people would like to use Java and GTK but not GNOME..."

Yes, Gtk is fine, especially with C. Java offers a lot of higher level functionalities than C does, and Gtk is a viable and fast toolkit.  So I hope there will be an improvement that does not rely strictly on Gnome, but will be more generic.