From a salesforce.com press release, via Patrick Logan:

Apex will empower customers, partners and developers with the same language and platform that have allowed salesforce.com to build its industry-leading on-demand service. Apex code and applications will run on salesforce.com’s service, freeing businesses for the first time from the burden of buying and deploying complex software infrastructure.

I’ve not yet made up my mind whether this is brilliant or stupid. The language definitely doesn’t look like it deserves to be loved.