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Sorry, but I do find the [] syntax confusing, as it's never clear what is the method and what are the arguments.

Well in the beginning I had difficulties too, I didn't "got it". In fact, it's really simple :

[myObject messageWithArgument1: foo andArgument2: bar];

the function's name (function signature, or selector) is NOT

messageWithArgument1:

as you could think, but :

messageWithArgument1:andArgument2: !

In fact, you put your arguments "inside" the method's name/call ... it's not simply that you "name" the argument, the "argument's name" is part of the method's name.

I've not seen anybody mentioned the big disadvantage of Objective-C, in that it's very slow.

It's not "very slow". It's a compiled language, and frankly I don't see the difference when programming with GNUstep or with Qt. I "know" that methods invocations are a bit slower due to indirection, but it's barely noticeable. I think that today's computer are too fast ;-) (and remember, NeXT ran on 68030, and their eventual slowness was mostly due to DisplayPostscript, not ObjC). Anyway, the biggest problem due to rapidity in a program is generally due to a bad algorithm/architecture rather than the language itself.

And of course, if you want, it's trivial to "cache" the method call, thus no more indirection, it's as fast a standard C function call !

You could easily use directly C if you care so much (never had the need to do that in fact).

Python has the advantages of a non-confusing syntax and true garbage collection.

Personnally I can't stand the tab thing with Python... ;-)
But what's your thing with garbage collection ? With GNUstep, you are free to use a real garbage collector instead of retain/release ! (Mac OS X can't, yes, but it's available on GNUstep).

But strangely, retain/release/autorelease is more used anyway (I think that's because it's quite simple mechanism, efficient, and far painless than C memory handling, and not very complicate).