> that seems backwards to me

I'm not sure I completely understand which part you find backwards. Do you mean merging language runtimes and the OS is a bad idea, or that you think merging them would lead to more innovation?

I can see an argument for both (in terms of innovation), but being able to run only one language environment on a computer at a given time would make it much harder and heavy weight to use new languages. Or at the very least, new language runtimes.