I understand that the Smalltalk like syntax of Objective C can be difficult to understand at first glance; however, once you've worked with it a bit, the syntax becomes quite expressive -- each argument is labeled; something like using named arguments in Ruby, but it's not optional.
Not sure what you mean about the APIs being nasty. Can you elucidate?
I understand not liking the syntax until you get used to it (I find it wordy, but very expressive), but what's wrong the APIs? Apple's documentation is pretty good and the APIs have lots of features especially with blocks. I also like that collections are immutable and the programmer must explicitly ask for the mutable version. Cocoa etc... is quite large, but once the programmer knows what's available many problems that are hard in other frameworks are trivial when coding for OSX/iOS.
Java is well java. I find one of Java's strongest points the extensive set of collections available. Add in Apache Commons and java is easy enough to use.
