The advantage the DVM has is it's a baseline that developers can work with instead of worrying about hardware.
This was probably very desirable to Google in 2005 as it gave them the chance to court mobile manufacturers with the promise that their operating system can be deployed across a range of devices and theoretically all apps etc should remain functional, regardless of hardware as it's the VM that's the deployment target, not the phone.
Remember that back in those days the mobile OS world was god awful, Symbian was abysmal, JavaME was broken and Windows CE....well let's not go there.
This was probably very desirable to Google in 2005 as it gave them the chance to court mobile manufacturers with the promise that their operating system can be deployed across a range of devices and theoretically all apps etc should remain functional, regardless of hardware as it's the VM that's the deployment target, not the phone.
Remember that back in those days the mobile OS world was god awful, Symbian was abysmal, JavaME was broken and Windows CE....well let's not go there.