Sure I'll just fork over $8,000 and get started... The beauty of BEAM is that I don't have to know or worry about projects like Zing, BEAM "just works." (Another mark against Zing just because you brought it up -- where's the source code?)
It's not that you don't have to know or worry about groundbreaking projects like Zing, but that they don't exist. The resources put into advancing the Erlang ecosystem are a tiny fraction of those put into the JVM ecosystem, and it shows.
You say BEAM "just works", but it "just works" if you can put up with its non-stellar performance or happen to play directly to its strengths. Any technology just works if you happen to need exactly what it provides. Java and the JVM, however, like the Linux kernel, are a huge project with vast resources, wide reach and very wide applicability from small embedded devices to mainframes. So, naturally, there are a lot of things to choose from, but you are guaranteed to find one that suits your need -- no matter what it is.
Too many Erlang projects start out thinking Erlang is good enough, and then find that they need to write more and more of their code in C. This just cannot happen with the JVM. Not that it's appropriate for everything (it's bad for command-line utilities and Java SE is inappropriate for constrained environments), but it's much harder to miss. You don't need to know or worry about Zing unless you need what it provides (worst-case latency of under 50us); similarly for other tens of thousands of JVM libraries and tools. All you need to know is that you can find a high-quality implementation of whatever you might need down the line.
As for Zing's source code: Zing is proprietary, but as the JVM ecosystem is so big, there's a similar open-source attempt by Red Hat and intended to go into OpenJDK called Shenandoah[1]. Its code is here: http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/jdk9-shenandoah/hotspot/
I'm aware of Zing and I'm pretty sure it would fare way better in this kind of problem. However, I'm inclined to guess that every time you sink 1 hour of work into BEAM, there is somewhere between 5-15 hours sunk into OpenJDK and other VMs in Java space. It wins many competitions by brute force alone.
Furthermore, Erlang has some things against it in the speed department:
It is forced functional.
It is dynamically typed (A tracing JIT can somewhat alleviate this problem).
But I think the BEAM architecture is pretty sound. It has a lot of things in common with a micro kernel, architecturally. And while micro kernels are not popular currently, they see a lot of use in the embedded space, on sattelite's and so on.
Yet people seem to think OpenJDK is the only one.