What's the Objective, See?

Java on the Mac has a bunch of really nice features. Things that solve common problems on other platforms.

There are all kinds of applications for which integration for the Mac is a little half-baked. Some applications (like GIMP, for example) are clearly second-class citizens. They start, they run, but they're always "different".

And I'm not sure that Objective-C makes any sense to me. It seems like Objective-C and Cocoa are Mac developers' favourite way of building apps. Who uses Objective-C for anything else? It seems... self-marginalizing. I mean, I'm not really into Ruby or Python in any big way, but if either of those were used in place of Objective-C, I'd understand.