Microsoft TRIED to get people to move to a "better" language (C#, which IS arguably better than Java) but the .NET runtime is massive and doesn't ship with existing tablets/phones, meaning it (or rather, Mono) would add 10Mb+ to a download size that needs to stay under 20Mb to download over-the-air (2G/3G/4G).

A lot of people did jump on that bandwagon, but C# isn't really great for games, and so the adoption has been lukewarm outside of the Xbox/Windows Phone development community.

Point is, until someone has created something that really is BETTER than C++ in the ways that it needs to be (which probably requires heavy investment in tools as well as libraries), it's going to be an uphill battle to get people to change.

Even if you had the Perfect Ultimate Language designed an implemented today, you'd need support in everyone's editors, debuggers (including source-level remote debugging support and any necessary server modification on all target platforms), cross-platform build support to all the relevant architectures, C/C++ linkage (unless you plan to rewrite all current libraries), JNI linkage (so you could interoperate with Java, which is required on Android), and support for multiple paradigms (NO single-paradigm language will ever be adopted across the board, nor should it be -- different programming problems are solved best with different paradigms).

Honestly "D" is the language that best fits the bill that I'm aware of, though it has a long way to go as far as support on other platforms and mindshare. I haven't yet USED D, though, so I can't really critique it intelligently.