Your comments about hardware, and virtual memory in particular, reminded me of this good talk by Gary Bernhardt:

If you haven't seen it and have a few minutes to spare, it's enjoyable and maybe even a little thought provoking about whether hardware virtual memory is a good use of resources going forward.

And as for a radically different architecture, the Mill CPU has a great series of talks on video devoted to its development. It doesn't challenge your point about languages transparently supporting underlying system variations. But it will provide a very different target for compilers and JIT's which may favor some languages over others.