Some folks at Microsoft were trying to circumvent this with Singularity OS being based on something like CLR. Then everything could dynamically interoperate with everything on a programming language level.
If I recall correctly, the point of Singularity wasn't to have a platform base where all programming languages shared the same infrastructure, but rather to have an operating system that ran (almost) entirely in "managed code" (the .net framework's safe-execution system).
http://xkcd.com/927/