Well, I think there's a very big practical difference between being unsafe in general and unsafe only within clearly delimited boundaries (that you can forbid with a lint). The latter is pretty much necessary for any language other than strictly sandboxed ones like JavaScript, while the former is something I think
all languages in 2016 should take as sacrosanct from the get-go. (We've been trying and failing for about 45 years to prove that programmers will avoid making the same basic memory management mistakes if they're just trained better; I think it's well past time to give up and delegate these checks to the machine.)
That said, I don't agree with the claim that Nim is less safe than Rust because Nim uses "ptr" types and Rust uses "unsafe" blocks to mark unsafe regions. I prefer Rust's approach, but it's pretty much just a question of UI, not anything substantive.