I had some background in programming before taking the intro CS course at my college, but not much. This intro class is done in C and most students who take it seriously, myself included, think this is a good choice. I think C probably seems more difficult than it is to those who are used to high level languages because they are accustomed to concise programs while C requires many more lines of code. Someone new to coding isn't used to the concision of other programming languages so this doesn't bother them.

And aside from pointers, there really isn't anything in C that is harder than any other programming language. I personally found pointers easy to learn, which I think was the result of having them explained clearly and then being forced to use them in my code.