COM was meant to be language-agnostic, so I don't see how it's basically C++...
The C wrappers generated by MIDL are also fairly similar to raw C++, compare (where pUnk is an IUnk *):
pUnk->Something(&bA);
with... IUnk_Something(pUnk, &bA);
which expands to something like this: pUnk->lpVtbl->Something(pUnk, &bA);