Learning Objective-C really isn’t that hard, though.
For most people - who just want to write stuff for iPhone (in addition to wahtever else they write for web) - it’s only going to take a couple of days at most to learn ObjC.
Pretty much: learn how to use basic ref-counting, learn how to use Apple’s rather crap @property syntax (and the bizarre rules about usage), learn the basic method calls for the Apple rendering libraries, and finally: learn how to write anythign at all in Xcode (the IDE you are forced to use).
I was shocked that it took me a mere 7 hours - from scratch - to write my first game on iPhone (including time taken to write my first hello-world App). It also took an extra 7 hours or so just to read various obj-c docs, so all in all I started one morning, and finished the following evening.
For comparison (I’m not a great nor an especially fast coder) that’s about how long it took me to get my first game working with Slick.
So … while I eagerly watch the experiments with Java->ObjC compilation, that really shouldn’t hold anyone back from just learnign ObjC and going and writing some games right now. Especially given how easy it is to earn real cash from iPhone apps right now (it’s very easy to earn a few thousand dollars per app; earning tens of thousands is hard, 100’s of thousands very hard, and more than that is a lot of luck - even for huge dev teams (I know three teams that spent more than 400k dollars on iphone development and failed to make a profit)).