There's a big fail here, but I don't think it's the lack of native support.
What percentage of highly successful, heavily used Android apps rely on native code? It seems that 99% of the dev community is fine writing Java.
Hell, why are WP7 devs clamoring for native code anyways? It's because the .NET performance is terrible. The failure IMO is in .NET, not the lack of C++. The capitulation and addition of C++ support isn't a strict win either - devs now have access to performance, at a substantial engineering effort cost. Doing things that would have been simple on other platforms now requires C++ hackery.
why are WP7 devs clamoring for native code anyways? It's because the .NET performance is terrible.
Wrong. It's not because of .Net performance. They're asking for native support, mainly to make much easier to port games and other apps from Android and iOS to WP, being able to actually reuse code, instead of a complete rewrite. Nobody wants to write the entire app several times, when targeting to multiple platforms.
My personal experience with C++ on Windows (CE in 2002) was not very encouraging WRT portability. You may get more commonality between destop Windows and WP7 than between WP7 and Android but the code may end up with a lot of ifdefs and windows-isms in it. It's been a while, so YMMV.
It could, in fact, be easier to mechanically translate between Java and C# than going C++.
Android doesn't have a good native toolchain but somehow they still provide native support, no matter how inconvenient it is.
In contrary, Microsoft have a great native toolchain (years of work in IDE, debugger, compiler) there but decided developers should not use it. And this is why it is so stupid.
What percentage of highly successful, heavily used Android apps rely on native code? It seems that 99% of the dev community is fine writing Java.
Hell, why are WP7 devs clamoring for native code anyways? It's because the .NET performance is terrible. The failure IMO is in .NET, not the lack of C++. The capitulation and addition of C++ support isn't a strict win either - devs now have access to performance, at a substantial engineering effort cost. Doing things that would have been simple on other platforms now requires C++ hackery.