Some people consider it free too which is very painful. Like pretending networks don't have latency.

It seems to be far easier (i.e., possible) to go from a manual-memory-management style of development to an automatic one than the other way around. I've known plenty of Java-CS-degree programmers who just never could get the hang of writing C/C++ code without leaking stuff (and not just memory).

This is a key point that I think lots of GC proponents gloss over. Memory is not the only resource that needs to be managed. Open file handles, sockets, user sessions, whatever... they all need to be managed in much the same way as memory.