In Ruby GC just works dandy without thought. Why is it so different in Cocoa Obj2.0? What kinda of real headaches will I have jumping into osx programing compared to ruby ?
The short answer is that Ruby is a nifty high level scripting language that insulates the programmer thoroughly from pointers and memory management. In contrast, C is a low level "systems" programming language that relies on pointers. Many things you might want to program require the low level capabilities of C. For example, I bet the Ruby garbage collector is written in C. Operating systems, device drivers, high performance graphics, etc. all use close to the hardware features provided by C but absent from Java, Ruby, Python, C#, etc.
Objective-C is a combination of the original object oriented language, Smalltalk, and C. The Smalltalk heritage is what makes Objective-C/ Cocoa programming so powerful and flexible. The C heritage is what makes Objective-C/Cocoa so versatile and able to seamlessly integrate with the billions of lines of C code in the world.
With C comes pointers. With the availability of arbitrary pointers and pointer arithmetic, it is basically impossible to provide ubiquitous automatic garbage collection. Therefore, Objective-C will always be saddled with edge cases where garbage collection will be messy or at least not automatic. Furthermore, there are lots of applications in which Objective-C can be used but automatic garbage collection can not. For example, memory and resources that are not allocated from the heap, such as shared memory, VRAM, distributed objects, etc. can not be automatically collected.
Ruby solves the "what to do with uncollectible resources" problem by just not letting you access them. You won't see a high performance 3D game engine written in Ruby any time soon! You will see Ruby libraries built to use a 3D engine written in C or Objective-C.
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