I think the proper rant would be about ambiguous spec which leads to strange outputs from different compilers, then results in very hacky ways to provide even some level of portability.

It may not provide enough abstractions to match your awesome Ruby on Rails application for your next great startup but that is OK. Lets try to remember that C was invented to avoid writing Unix in assembly, which all previous OS'es were written in. So abstraction-wise it supplies enough abstraction for its time and usage.