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It's not of much use when the VM isn't freely available or redistributable.

Umm...of course it have value if the VM isn't freely available or redistributable.

It helps proof the technology. It helps work out the integration issues and expose the fundamental problems of things like VMs running within the kernel.

All of that needs some kind of test bed for folks to work on and investigate the problem space.

The advantages of such a technology has many pros: the potential for portable drivers is one, but more so, the ability to right more robust drivers more quickly is, to me, the predominant benefit of such an endeavor. It lets developers work out the "hard parts" in an ideally more safe environment than C, and less risk and turn around time.

Once they have a stable VM driver, they can then, perhaps, port it to C for performance if/when that becomes necessary.

For portable drivers, if the VM version of the driver is portable, but fully functional and not necessarily performant, it at least provides a solid framework to allow others to port the driver to C for their specific platform, since the VM driver is a working skeleton and example exposing the inner guts of the drivers implementation.

Finally, of course, it goes with out mention that whining about a freely distributable version of the VM is a completely dead horse as that train is running, and Sun is already on the path to an OSS Java and JVM. Now, it's simply a matter of time.

Of course it has value, but the situation you describe looks more like an academic research project to me, rather than a real solution to the lack of drivers for platforms other than Windows and to a lesser extent Linux x86. Sorry that this wasn't clear.