Pauses

Keep in mind that pauses of a few microseconds are way too much for certain environments (financial, aerospace, industrial, etc). Garbage collected languages in general are a serious problem in those sorts of environments.

The problem is that a lot of colleges teach those gc'd languages and the skillset pool is rather deep. Also, lets not forget the argument for RAD. A mere mortal can generally crank out a lot more java/C#/<insert_modern_garbage_collected_language_here> than raw C. Not that I'm hating on C by any means, but it isn't unreasonable for them to want their cake and eat it too.