As someone who is french and has spent a year in Beijing learning chinese, I have to agree on what you said. French grammar must be the worst, I haven't run into a more difficult language at the moment, and I found chinese quite easy to learn.

It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!

I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.

But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...