On Thursday, there was a keynote titled "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell", given by Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg, the leaders of the London JUG. It comforted me in my idea that Englishmen are crazy. And they can look scary too, at least in hell...
More seriously, this talk showed two versions of the future of Java, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one. The message is that the version that will actually occur depends on us. They enjoined us to download the beta versions of Java 8, give our feedback, even participate on the Open JDK effort, because this is the only way we can ensure that the future of Java will be what we want it to be.