I think that is true, but I think there is another problem as well. There is no, to my knowledge, equivalent of GCC for an FPGA, and by that I mean a free, open source, cross platform synthesizer. You are stuck using their tools, and they are generally suboptimal at best when it comes to the IDEs at least.
I think one of the main problems is that it is the FPGA manufacturers that also provide the toolchains, and that is your only option.
Edit: Also, forgot to add. I am not sure FPGAs are that ameniable to using higher level languages simply because you can make a trivial adjustment to your code and resource usuage will jump from 1% to 27%, which is not trivial. It used to be the same with your normal CPUs, every cycle counted, this will improve with time of course.
I think one of the main problems is that it is the FPGA manufacturers that also provide the toolchains, and that is your only option.
Edit: Also, forgot to add. I am not sure FPGAs are that ameniable to using higher level languages simply because you can make a trivial adjustment to your code and resource usuage will jump from 1% to 27%, which is not trivial. It used to be the same with your normal CPUs, every cycle counted, this will improve with time of course.