Unpredictable latency is a huge no-no in these days of responsive server applications. Long GC pauses are just not acceptable to many server developers, so I don't think it's correct to consider it only a client-side problem. If you look at the mechanical sympathy mailing list, you'll see a large group of Official Knob Turners for the Java garbage collectors discussing their trade.
The point is not that latency doesn't matter. It's that throughput and latency are more or less a fundamental tradeoff in GC, and latency isn't the only thing that matters.
Yes, that's true, but this GC lets you get more throughput by using more memory, so you can still decide how you want to make that trade-off. But no amount of knobs can save you from a long stop-the-world pause, so they made absolutely the right decision, in my opinion. With multi-core server CPUs, throughput is relatively cheap to obtain. Latency is hard, you can't just throw money at the problem.
