Kotlin uses the same VM and API, so it makes no difference in this regard. It's not a big change – it's fully interoperable with Java. You can easily take a single class in a Java application and rewrite it in Kotlin, and everything continues working just as before.
Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.
Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.