The failure of J2ME has nothing to do with your particular preference for non-Java UIs. J2ME was a creature of the early 2000s. JSR-88 ( the J2ME spec ) was a done deal by early 2003. Implementations & maintenance releases rolled out over 2003-2007.
In contrast, Android 1.0 was released in Sep 2008. All of the success stories of Android, the apps & suchlike, are the post-2010 timeframe. Notwithstanding the experience of hindsight, you had a decade between J2ME & Android, which is like a light year in tech timeframe. Nobody could imagine billions of consumers buying mobile apps in app stores back in 2000. Today that's a reality. To attribute change in customer behavior solely to Android being better than J2ME is quite bizarre. Today, Android is an order of magnitude better than J2ME. But when it debuted, J2ME was infinitely better than anything out there because there was practically nothing else. The remarkable Android UI experience is due to => Scott Chase and Romain Guy => The same Swing gurus who wrote the crappy Java Swing UIs that made you puke :)
There's a time to everything, a time to tear down and a time to build - Ecclesiastes.
There is no such a person as "Scott Chase". Maybe you mean "Chet Haase". Chet joined the Android team in May 2010, way, way after Android became the success it is today.
Having said that, you are quite right to credit Romain for a lot of the UI we see in Android, and there's also a reason why he didn't stay at Sun: he was one of the few graphic engineers who actually cared about releasing good graphical user interfaces.
You are right about the timing and it not just being a UI design issue and I certainly didn't mean otherwise. But could you build J2ME apps that were elegant and WORA without pain? Android mostly makes that a piece of cake. Do you think J2ME kept up with times in the post iPhone era? Do you think if it wasn't for Android, under Sun/Oracle J2ME would have been competent in 2012? Fact remains that J2ME was mostly a failure and even with the hardware and UI advances it hasn't improved. There are reasons for that.
Failure of J2ME had to do with the flawed process, the technology, the design, the backwardness, the inability to keep up with times, the failure of the WORA promise, the fragmentation and Sun's management lacking any and all vision. Licensing from Sun would have likely meant Google would have found itself in a déjà vu situation. That was the point I was trying to make :)
There's a time to everything, a time to tear down and a time to build - Ecclesiastes.