There is a crucial point that should not be ignored. The first two languages someone learns should be easy. Monstrosities like C++ give the poor beginner the impression that learning any language is hard to learn, and that would discourage such learning in the future.
I disagree 100%, if you're talking about a college curriculum. The intro class at my university [1] used C, and I'm incredibly grateful. If I hadn't been forced to grok pointers and malloc, I'm not sure I ever would have (I haven't done any C programming since then). But even though I'm not writing C directly, knowing how things work at a lower level has helped me understand all sorts of concepts in higher-level languages.
[1] http://cs50.tv
I don't loathe C nearly as much as C++. I understand that learning about low level is useful. Pointers are indeed a very important concept (though not so difficult once you understand that variables themselves are already a form of indirection). So is Manual memory management.
But if you are tempted to put C++ in the same basket, don't. C++ is a very very different language from C. Sure, it looks like it just has some additional features here and there, but those features make C++ practices very different from C ones.
As experts, syntax doesn't annoy us. We see past the curly brackets (or the parentheses), because we can quickly see the internal AST that derive from them. Beginners can't.
Now, it would be wonderful to teach them a systems language that forces them to manage their own memory. I think a good candidate would be to keep most of the semantics of C, but simplifying its syntax (and find a solution to simplify includes).