Mac Development

I'm not really doing any Mac development at the moment, though I have considered it. What surprises me about OSX is just that Apple hasn't modernized the development platform very much. They don't, for instance, have a virtual machine like the CLR. Why does Windows have .NET and OSX not have anything?
It seems somewhat stoneage to have the only language for Mac development be the venerable but crusty Objective-C. The standard variety of Objective-C does not have garbage collection, and it has all the unpleasant benefits of unmanaged C. I haven't done much development with Objective-C, so I can't say how often memory leaks arise; I do appreciate their auto-release pools and associated reference counting mechanisms, but I strikes me that in modern times, and for application development, there isn't any good excuse not to have automatic memory management in your application. I know that Objective-C 2.0 or whatever has a garbage collector, but it seems half-ass. And it doesn't work on the iphone apparently; so that screws most the Objective-C market.
I really like the idea of Macruby; the HotCocoa screencasts are very impressive. I'd absolutely love to be able to do Cocoa development without having to resort to Xcode and the interface builder. However, it is not clear how stable or production-ready MacRuby is. Their only at version 0.4 -- not that version numbers mean anything -- but I don't have any confidence that Apple is actually committed to the MacRuby project. I mean... where's their epic plan for future development on the Mac. Is MacRuby it? Is that all they've got? That's good enough I suppose, but it seems like their just diddling around with it: they haven't moved forward from Objective-C ever. No innovation, no development, except within the context of what's already there. I know they replaced Carbon or whatever with Cocoa, but I'm talking about building a real managed runtime like you see with .NET or the JVM. Something that can host multiple languages and provide the kinds of things developers have come to expect from modern platforms: the most important being (and I hate to harp on this, but it's true) -- memory management! There's no greater productivity booster for application development than not having to track down memory leaks all the time. And, like I said, maybe no one complains about that because it's not so much of an issue with Objective-C autorelease pools and strict naming conventions... but I still feel like this is some sort of medievilism on their part. Come on to the future why dontcha?
With respect to garbage collection, MacRuby solves that issue for Mac development. And it presents a nice dynamic (and non-compiled) language to add to the toolset. In the presentation I watched (perhaps I should post the link, but I am lazy), the dude mentioned that MacRuby would be set to become THE scripting language for the Mac platform. That makes sense of course, just because there isn't anything else. All the other scripting languages that run on Mac right now can only interact with Cocoa over a bridge; which sucks a lot. This would be the only instance of a scripting language running natively on the objective c runtime, with all the performance and easy accessiblity that entails.
Anyway... time to go. Bye.