Apple's shown that pro and consumer-level workstations and laptops have reached the maturity level where integration matters much more than optimization of components. Is it about time for integration between hardware designers and language designers? Languages that have message passing semantics could benefit from a particular hardware architecture that enables that. Functional languages with persistent collections might benefit from specific hardware designs.

I suspect that an Erlang-like language running on hardware specifically designed to support it could achieve tremendous scalability.