There is no such thing as general purpose VM.
Or, shorthand, a general purpose browser VM.
Unless, of course, you're arguing that the above is not truly possible, in which case I'd argue that's exactly what Google is exploring via PNaCL, and has (if not completely efficiently) been implemented across existing VMs. The PNaCL choice of LLVM bitcode was likely in error, but regardless, "no such thing" is a stretch.