IMHO, the interpreted vs. compiled debate is so blurry at this point that we should probably all just shut up about it. There are still a few purely-interpreted languages (*nix shells), and a few purely-compiled languages (C/C++, though you can get a interpreter if you really want to). But then you have this massive grey area of Perl, Java, and Python, where there is a compiler that creates bytecode and that bytecode is interperted to machine instructions. Sometimes the compiler and interpeter are in the same binary (Perl) and sometimes they're seperate (Java), but it's ultimately the same thing. For that matter, even C compilers often translate the code to an intermediate langauge before outputting the executable.

So I don't see a justification for continuing this debate anymore. The distinction between the two sides is already blured, and projects like the .NET CLR and Parrot are continuing this trend.