Has the author ever tried to teach anyone pointers? Who had never heard of them before? I've introduced several people to pointers, and while they aren't "hard" in the sense that it takes them months of hard labor to understand, there's a reason they have the reputation they do.
I personally love pointers, and have a bad habit of trying to do my own memory management with them.
IMHO, the only problem with teach pointers is that professors try to dress them up. Not understanding a pointer typically means not understanding the basics of the underlying hardware. This touches on one of the common problems today is that software has been split away from the hardware that runs it.
I'm certainly not saying that anyone who writes software needs to know the ins and outs of a modern CPU, but basic knowledge of how a computer works (memory, CPU, DMA, mmio, etc...) is what's often missing when talking about low level programming concepts.
Yes, I tutored CS in C++ for a few years, and near-tautological explanations like these seemed to work best to cut through the explanations of the professors. I like to think I've helped create a good programmer or two. In general the profs were trying to be strictly correct, at the cost of explaining things in terms that their students would actually understand.
I personally love pointers, and have a bad habit of trying to do my own memory management with them.