I'd say the standout feature that puts Java at a higher level than Objective-C is garbage collection. You could also say that Objective-C is lower level becuase it's a strict superset of C. Admittedly, it's a murky distinction. Is there a good argument for why one might consider Obj-C to be the higher level language?

I'm not familiar with Objective C; is Smalltalk-style method dispatch considered more powerful than Java method dispatch?

Objective-C supports garbage collection (optionally).

Not on the iPhone. I'd trade performance for garbage collection. Memory leaks are very common.

I'd agree that Java isn't inherently better than Objective C. There are things I like and dislike about both. It's not like comparing Ruby to C. However, you do get other advantages to using Java. In Android, every app runs in it's own VM, so multi-tasking has always been a no-brainer. I guess Apple solved the sandboxing issues, but it probably wasn't easy, and I wonder what tough decisions they had to make. Plus, it's at least in theory possible to compile any language you like to Java bytecode. So, we could see Ruby or Python apps for Android at some point. That's never going to happen with Apple for about a dozen reasons, the least of which is probably Objective C.