I wrote a lot of J2ME stuff a few years ago and you're spot on. I spent two weeks doing Java 8 bits with NetBeans which was really nice and spent the last two evenings writing my first Android app and what a complete mess it is. Plus the Android tooling is horrible to get working reliably - most problems being solved by "restart eclipse".
I also did some J2ME stuff back in 2003, most with Sharp and Nokia devices.
I read somewhere that some in the Android team are C converts doing their first Java gig.
Have you seen how broken are the generated Renderscript bindings? They don't have anything to do with Java conventions and feel completely out of place.
Haven't looked at render script yet. Still scratching head on the layout engine stuff and View infrastructure. It's fugly. I usually write C#+WPF and C++/Qt and HTML/Java EE and all of those are massively nicer to deal with.
If you are two days in and still getting around how Views and layout works I wouldn't call it a mess yet. You are still pretty early into it. Its not messy its just new to you.
From my experience once you get past the initial hump of learning their basic APIs and conventions its a very easy to work with platform. Maybe I am biased because I spend a lot of time with it. I also really like the tooling. How is it acting unstable for you?
Reflection
Serialization
Lambda expressions (JSR 335)
JNI and application native code
User-defined class loaders
Full annotations support (Runtime annotations)
Thread groups and demon threads
Full Math APIs (with BigDecimals)
Concurrency utilities
Full security APIs
Full collection APIs (Sorted collection classes)
Google did indeed managed to pull a Microsoft and now we have a forked Java implementation getting steady behind the standard Java implementations.
Even J2ME is more compatible with its big brother than Android.
KitKat has now partial support for Java 7, with libraries still missing some pieces. Dalvik and ART still don't support invokedynamic bytecode.
And since almost no one has KitKat, one cannot use try-with-resources anyway.