"It chose to attack the lowest-hanging fruit first, the one thing about Apple's development environment most likely to stand out as primitive and backwards to programmers coming from other platforms or even fresh out of school: manual memory management."

ARC works great until you have cyclic references. Then you "just" have to add "Zeroing Weak References". Ok. Where? How do I know when I have to add them?

The problem with reference counted memory management is NOT having to type [x retain]. Its having to KNOW where NOT to type it. ARC doesn't solve this at all. It just allows an entire generation of programmers to stop thinking about it altogether. That's going to end well.