And yet iOS still seems justified (based on its competition) in eschewing garbage collection to avoid stuttering; iOS apps that display a lot of data routinely have to go to surprisingly annoying lengths to maintain 60fps[1]; there are several different runtimes that promise to let you write iOS apps in various high level languages (Flash, JavaScript, C#, etc.) but invariably most of the demo apps are laggy or buggy (and games often ship with much higher hardware requirements than the norm for the platform, which probably affects battery life as well).

The C family sucks, but it's not nearly as clear as you imply that there's a better realistic alternative.

[1] http://blog.atebits.com/2008/12/fast-scrolling-in-tweetie-wi...