Plus, Java does have anonymous inner classes, which can be used in a fashion pretty similar to lambdas although with clumsier syntax than most people would like.

Yours is a crucial point that I think got munged in the Java 7 closures debate, since a lot of Java people didn't know what closures were, and a lot of people on the outside maybe didn't know what Java lacked or didn't lack, so there were definitely a few blog posts that conflated them with lambdas.