Objective-C has many good features - native strings is not one of them. There is no syntactic support for appending two strings by a simple '+', for example NSString* myString = @"This is a " + "string.";

That simple omission introduces a large amount of pain when working with Objective-C for a large class of applications - especially web-aware, but also including code that parses files.

It's the same story with regards to regular expressions - yes there are libraries that can do the job, but they just aren't as pleasant to use as regexps are in the various scripting languages - python, ruby, perl, javascript, etc, where regular expressions are first-class