That's not true. One of the main objectives of Clojure was to be a hosted language. Not just 'language hosted on JVM'. So idea to make it work on top of Erlang VM is perfectly valid and consistent with original design assumptions.
Whether it's as important now or not is a different matter I suppose, with various targets for the language (including other VMs), but I don't think it's in dispute that originally the extensive java ecosystem was core to what clojure was, and was designed to be.
...but hey, don't take my word for it:
The net result is that the prospects for Clojure going forward are
very good. The core model of Clojure has held up well and continues to
appeal - accessible, robust, thread-safe, efficient dynamic functional
programming, on a world-class infrastructure, with a huge set of
libraries. Oh yeah, and it's great fun!
- Rich Hickey, 2008
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/2CA_H58Cbo0
That might have referred to the CLR and the JVM though since Clojure has targeted both runtimes from the start (although the JVM implementation is leading of course.)
Except then it might not have had as much uptake (tooling, existing Java libraries, installability to various providers and interoperability with existing systems etc.).
Now that Clojure has a varied and excellent set of libraries of its own maybe some of this is less important, but not all (the ability to interact with existing Java systems is still very useful).
To be fair, and I find this to be a bit of a shame, but most of that robustness and ecosystem comes straight from Erlang, which was always solid. Though I do enjoy the consistency that Elixir brings and the improved macros. I'm a Clojure guy, so I also love the protocols.
Just wanted to say that Erlang vanilla is robust and has a great ecosystem. So Elixir builds itself on top of a solid foundation.
Also, JVM is great. :)