Why is it a bad thing that someone was willing to pay money to make Java fast. Do you want to say that there haven't been billions of dollars in both money and man-hours thrown at trying to make C/C++ fast? There's no free performance.
I guess there's someone who wants to pay for that.
But I don't think it's money well spent. The Java bytecode is not designed for or suited to fast execution and it's a bad intermediate representation for computer programs to be compiled into native code. The Java byte code was designed to be easy to interpret and was designed at a time when a memory access was faster to execute than an ALU instruction (on cheap h/w where Java was originally intended to be run on). Those days have passed and we should move on to better intermediate representations for computer programs. Like LLVM IR.
VMkit is a nice effort, though. I hope it will some day power fancy new languages that have dynamic features which are not well suited for AOT compilation.