According to this post, in .Net,

Finalizers are actually even worse than that. Besides that they run late (which is indeed a serious problem for many kinds of resources), they are also less powerful because they can only perform a subset of the operations allowed in a destructor (e.g., a finalizer cannot reliably use other objects, whereas a destructor can), and even when writing in that subset finalizers are extremely difficult to write correctly. And collecting finalizable objects is expensive: Each finalizable object, and the potentially huge graph of objects reachable from it, is promoted to the next GC generation, which makes it more expensive to collect by some large multiple.

Does this also apply to JVMs in general and to HotSpot in particular?