Victim of trying it the first week it came out, having to call down into C for anything POSIX, and giving up. If you don't have POSIX bindings, don't call yourself v 1.0.
I've been using Swift for a few months and really want to like it. That said, breaking down to unsafepointer for newbie tasks is unacceptable IMHO. Try to do basic stuff like TCP/IP socket coms without a third party library or heck, just get the IPv4 address of your network interface.
I assume, they mean that you don't need to have C at all. See how Go for example doesn't require C on most platforms to make syscalls (IIRC, the exceptions are Windows and Solaris).
