Well - I think this is merely a marketing reason. Sun did a lot of marketing with Java. Moreover I have to remind that Java is not the only language that offers web applets: A short time after HotJava, Grail was released - this is a web browser entirely written in Python with the capability of Python applets. The problem with Grail is that it is rather slow, moreover it never gained the publicity of HotJava but the idea itself is great.
What I would like to see is a plugin for Netscape/IE that enables the webbrowser to run Python applets, but it seems that no one is interested in this. (At least I never heard of such a project)
Applets are not what you want really (too much 1997-something). It would probably be better with a plugin doing python script-handling: <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Python">. And making the DOM accessable from Python-scripts. It accualy be rather exciting because the object origentation in JavaScript (EMCA) is not at Pythons level. Even greater would be a Zope-browser with clientside object presistans. Zope-DOM maybe? The problem is that the users don't care about Python (nor Java) and to get them to download a plug-in just to access your website. Best Regards, Johan Carlsson