Do those guys do any "real" computing? Have they even watched what a company scientist uses the computer to do? Yes, it's true that the *presentation* layer of computer usage is and should be hardware agnostic, there is till the matter of the *real* computing which still gets done behind the scenes, transparently to the end-user. What cannot be made "agnostic" is the data management, the SQL Server role and the massaging & number crunching on that data and then finally the remassaging for presentation format, once assembled in the current application's required form.

Java et.al. are and should be hardware agnostic BUT they are trivial parts of the whole overall computing experience.