I attended a Swift workshop (hosted by Apple) on my campus today. After the workshop, I asked one of the Apple engineers what he recommended in terms of developing iOS apps. He told me that he hadn't even seen what Swift looked like until today, that Apple employees are banned from using it (and that they actually have code checkers to make sure), and that he wouldn't learn it solely w/o Obj-C until a few years from now. He noted that Apple is still changing it a lot, as it's young, so the structure of the language could change dramatically between now and next year.
He thought it was good idea when I suggested learning Obj-C and then using Swift to cut down on dev time, b/c it is quicker for many things.
I think a lot of the blame for the backlash in the iOS community over Swift should be laid squarely at Apple's feet. At WWDC they pitched it as production-ready but the truth is that even today it is seriously unfinished. It doesn't even support incremental compilation and the tooling is still very fragile. I'd strongly recommend anybody new to iOS to start with ObjC for now. You need to at least be able to read ObjC to understand the APIs and all of the sample code out there and it's still overall a more productive environment.
I don't think any of Swift's current problems are unfixable but I'd give it another year or so at least to mature.
I think Apple's internal policies regarding employees use of Swift for Apple's own software dev should be published as part of the Swift documentation. If it's not good enough for them, it's not good enough for me, but as they gradually change their policies, I'll probably change mine.
He thought it was good idea when I suggested learning Obj-C and then using Swift to cut down on dev time, b/c it is quicker for many things.