I recently wrote a project in C# 2.0 and i actually had the opposite conclusion; the inspiration from Java is clearly there but even by 2.0 it had diverged pretty meaningfully
Yes the languages have diverged, especially the ecosystems. For big data projects Java/JVM languages are preferred. For many open source projects too, Java is preferred because C# was late to the OSS party. But for many enterprise web applications ASP.NET works well.
