This is a recurring theme. The Java proponents' alternative to the FREE BEAM VM is $8,000 per machine or some other high priced stuff. I could afford an extra IT person just by switching to BEAM on several machines!? Sign me up!
The pricey alternative is if you want the absolute best. The free alternative is already (with high probability, based on Erjang and more recent improvements) much better than BEAM. Not to mention the costs you save by not writing C code and having an immense selection of high-quality libraries to choose from.
Do you have proof that Erjang is better than Erland/BEAM with real-world benchmarks? Far as libraries, I'd agree with you that there's more. The quality part varies per library.
Indeed, they have good marketing :). Don't get me wrong, I think Azul and its C4 GC is very nice. However, beyond some absolute best case on smallish heaps, I do not see it hitting guaranteed 20 micros on large server heaps. Also, Azul sacrifices some throughput in favor of minimizing GC latency, which is fine as most things need tradeoffs but should be mentioned (G1 also has lower throughput than parallel due to heavier write barriers).
