>It seems that if you unleash this wrapper onto a C programmer who has never used Cocoa, you'll just be in a world of hurt with unexplained memory leaks and segfaults due to misunderstood object lifetimes.

This is true for every API under the sun. If you just use it without reading the documentation or understanding the design philosophy, you're alyways in a world of hurt.

The same things that are true for Obj-C are true for the wrapper, it just lets you use the API in C. No more, no less.