What about the potential performance hit? Coming from a REALbasic and Java background, I'm very much aware that in any app of significant size, you can spend a great deal of time just working around the performance bottlenecks of reference-counting, not to mention related bugs in the framework that you have no power over. Then there's the problem of circular-references that prevent objects from being released. In my experience, it was an added problem not a benefit.

I like that in C++, there's a delete keyword. When you delete an object, it's gone. Compare this to REALbasic where you have to set every reference to nil and hope that the garbage collector gets the message.