First, there's no style of C++ I've seen in the field that totally eliminates any of the C-isms. Modern C++ code still has pointer math and it still has function pointers. In other words, you still have to learn the trickiest stuff from C.
Second, while <vector> is great, it's not a good idea to think about it as a black box. The whole food chain of STL containers from list to dequeue presumes that you understand the tradeoffs in actually implementing data structures in memory. How do you select and use these things intelligently if you've never even implemented a linked list? You're basically just writing a very verbose and very error prone form of Java.
Finally, C++ just isn't a very good language. There is nothing you can do in C++ that you can't deal with in C. There is a clear difference between the outcomes of, say, Perl and Python --- Python code is clearer and more maintainable. There are clear differences between Java outcomes and Rails outcomes --- the Rails code is tighter, smaller, simpler (though perhaps less featureful). Compare giant C and C++ codebases. What's the C++ win?
C vs. C++ is a can of worms. I know. But I've spent quality time in both languages and I'm an unabashed fan of C. I think the 2010 answer to the problem C++ wants to solve is "C and a high-level language". The future belongs to things like Lua (or Python with a better FFI, or...). C++ is a dead end.