Could the end be near in the not too far off future?
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/29/google-appears-ready-to-ditch-android-over-its-intellectual-property-issues
AppleInsider has become a very rabid Apple fansite and loves leaping to conclusions based around long articles with poor logic and lack of fact checking. When they concentrate on Apple related stuff they can be quite good but they flounder when it comes to other systems.
The Chromecast only includes a stripped down ChromeOS and no Android because it's a $35 device engineered to do certain tasks, and those tasks don't include running Android. It's hardly a shock that they reused their existing Google TV software stack in part. Most likely there is an aim to sell the design to TV manufacturers to include within their low to mid market TVs, with full Google TV in the higher end ranges.
Sheesh: "Android's Dalvik is essentially a rewritten, optimized variant of Sun's Java VM" - no, it's an entirely different virtual machine, register based, not stack based, and it's not very well optimised compared with a Java JIT JVM.
