Android is a Java userspace on top of a Linux kernel.
It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because that's just the kernel.
Shouldn't we start calling it Android/Linux? Oh, and, BTW, Java is just the language most people use to write (most of the) software for it. Dalvik is not the JVM and, in fact, the compiler people use to generate Dalvik bytecode doesn't read the Java sources - it read Java bytecode.
We can, but I don't know how meaningful that would be. When I say Linux I think of a combination of things, including the kernel, the GNU tools, a WM - i.e. a distro.
The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between (that's why they're getting sued :P). The important thing is that you write your apps in Java and you run them under a VM.
> The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between (that's why they're getting sued :P)
Not really. They are being sued because it's a threat to Oracle's control of Java. Dalvik may very well look a lot like JVM, but reason alone doesn't have any influence on Oracle's legal department.
And that's one of the good parts of Android. But C and C++ are not first class citizens, everyone is expected to use Java (Google's words) and assumptions made about a normal distro don't hold for Android.
It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because that's just the kernel.