Plenty of companies don't care one second that it is a MS product, in fact it is a positive value on their eyes regarding product support and tooling.
First of all there is more to Java Web development than JEE and Spring, which in any case, other eco-systems don't have a mature answer for many of their deployment scenarios and cross system integrations.
XML is beautiful, there is yet a format that supports machine manipulation, IDE graphical tooling, comments, schema validation as XML.
Anyone that praises Rails will be right at home with XML and annotations magic.