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platform gatekeeping, at a guess. though the existence of objective-c makes that status for swift be not-quite-technically-true.

You have no other choice to access the platforms latest and greatest features and the ones you can (through Objective-C) are less ergonomic to use.

Probably in that it's the language with first-class support on that platform. Adoption of the language is encouraged more by the target platform's support for it, than by its independent merits as a programming language.

I'm not sure I'd agree though; Swift shares this position with its predecessor Objective-C. Swift's success versus Objective-C can be attributed to its relative merits as a programming language.

Right, but it's much easier to be a successful language when you're only competing with one other language as opposed the whole field of options.