I said this in another reply, but I'll reiterate here. It's not the lack of Objective-C that is the big deal here. Afterall you are still interfacing with cocoa, and are stuck with a lot of the verbosity in doing that.
The real key to this is the REPL and interactivity between coding and the running app. Being able to edit bits of functionality and structure in the running app, and immediately see the results is AWESOME!