Because Objective-C is far from being an horror language, but perhaps your impression (and so mine) is conditioned by your past experience with your languages of choice.
If you can think abstractly and use/like languages like Ruby and Lisp (and their reflection/metaprogramming features), I think you'll be surprised by the amount of stuff you can do at runtime in native code. I started doing Obj-C a week ago and am about to submit my first free, 90% custom-drawn control app to Apple for approval.
Yes, the syntax is initially unappealing, but you get over it after about a day. On top of that, Xcode + Interface Builder is the best GUI dev environment I've used yet.
The runtime method dispatch of Objective-C (protocols!) makes it possible. Basically Objective-C gives you what Qt had to kludge in with qmake/moc. And it's still pretty fast!
When I see how little code I have to write to do something basic in Cocoa/Obj-C, and how well it turns out, any problems I have with syntax go out with the window.