Mono
I used to be faily excited about mono. However the religious ms is gonna get us propaganda is getting on my nerves. I have no problem with Ximian making a .NET implementation. However I do find it disguisting that they are dissing Java/Sun like there is no tommorrow and portray any Microsoft vaporware as world-changing technology.
Miguels big deployment rant boils down to "in the future Microsoft will allow deploying fat client applications from the web." There is a technology that allows running fat clients with advanced 2D/3D/etc capabilities from a web browser. It's called WebStart and it has been in use for several years now.
So please remember that Miguel has a personal agenda of promoting their .NET port at the cost of distoring reality. Most of the things Miguel talks about have already been put together into Java 1.[45] and they don't require us to wait for Ximian to finish their Mono take on them.

Microsoft
Well, I had a much lower opinion on the state of java web development until I read Microsoft's own comparison of it with ASP.NET. Propaganda aside, that article says that Struts match every ASP.NET feature. That's pretty impressive given that this is coming from Microsoft.

Java
Note: I'm not a Java nut. However, I've developed an appreciation for it after seeing what the rest of the programming environments provide/require. Java is not a universal solution. It just set the standard for the currently hyped platform features. Hopefully the language hype will move on to something other than better versions of Java