Unfortunately, it's also extremely expensive. That's not to say it isn't worth every penny in some situations, but I've gotten kind of spoiled by free development tools for personal projects. I'm glad the days of spending hundreds of dollars for things like C compilers are long behind me.

I agree that a really good AOT JVM would be very nice. It doesn't necessarily imply better performance however.

For some application domains, I would be happy to trade speed -- and even features -- for the ability to create a native binary with no dependencies.

This is one area where I find the Go programming language interesting. I prefer Java, but the lack of a good and free ahead-of-time compiler for Java that creates native binaries with no additional dependencies is a killer feature for some situations.