It doesn't help that multiple Oracle/Sun folks—including people like McNealy—said under oath that they don't believe that the licensing permits you to make commercial use, even if you opt for the GPL version.
I don't know what you're referring to, but FSF does not allow the GPL be used in such a way that the four freedoms are compromised by the licensor imposing additional restrictions.
First, you didn't describe an exception; you described additional restrictions. But now you're pivoting to talk about exceptions.
These are fundamentally different things. One enlarges the set of actions a recipient is free to do relative to what vanilla GPL allows. This is permitted (and in the case of the classpath exception, endorsed) by FSF. The other attempts to shrink the size of that set by denying the user things that the GPL would otherwise allow. The FSF simply does not permit the GPL to be used in that combination (and there would be extreme contrast in your last sentence and the failure to recognize the FSF's say in this).
And secondly, you've yet to substantiate your claim that Java was ever distributed with such GPL-modifying restrictions.
Glad to hear that; I thought I remembered reading something like that back when the license change was first announced, but I wasn't sure if something else had changed in the meantime.