If you only caught the headline from the recent OMGUbuntu article about Java being removed from Ubuntu, you may want to catch the whole story from Simon Phipps:
Java is not being removed from Ubuntu. OpenJDK is the open source version Java, is developed primarily by Oracle, is becoming the reference implementation and is available in Ubuntu. The Sun-Java packages under the DLJ were a temporary stop-gap we put in place before Java was liberated as GPL. Removing these packages is just housekeeping.
I guess Java lives on.