My friend, JS has a virtual monopoly on what it does. If there are other client-side browser languages, i have not heard of them.

>It has built-in interpreters (read "Browsers") on every computer.

JS is pretty slow (It uses an interpreter!). The notion of using it on the backend is debatable. "A lot of people are putting a lot of effort in to it" isn't a valid argument. u said it yourself: "people are told to/forced to use it"

As for the hardware thing, didn't you read the HN discussion about that? no body thinks that's a good idea. It just a way to let web devs do something on the hardware without bothering to learn an actual low level language.