>>>>Its very nice to have a simple programming language and API available with things like Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but that still puts too much power in the hands of a few companies, and locks us into particular implementations, and also traps us within the browser. Programmers and businesses do need easy-to-use, cross-platform and cross-device APIs and programming languages. I think we can port a lot of the Web APIs to a language-neutral, binary-neutral, implementation-neutral semantic representation. Dump as much of the unnecessary complexity from Web APIs as possible.

Well, this is exactly why I am a huge fan of technologies like MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) where the VM is under the control of the implementor, whose efforts to put the working VM on Platform-[X] results in a single codebase that will run on all Platform[s]. In my opinion, it pretty much matches your requirements, from the simple language, easy to use API, and more importantly: control over the host environment.

The only issue is that competence in MOAI in developing a cross-platform truly 100% compatible code base means you have to scale your attention from the up-front App, down to the lower-level host code. Or else. But thats 100% of the fun, imho ..

Note that this is just one of many such solutions to the issues you describe, and it is indeed a fertile playground for anyone with as much affinity for Lua - and similar tools - as one must have, to suffer the platform wars pleasantly, these days ..