I blame the quality of reference materials and the people doing the teaching, personally; most concepts in C (but especially pointers) are just plain taught badly. I keep threatening to write my own C book (titled The Last Thing The World Needs Is Another Book On The C Programming Language), but I don't have the time or the patience to do so. So I hang out here and throw random quotes from the Standard at people.
There's also the fact that when C was initially designed, it was assumed you understood machine architecture to a pretty detailed level just because there was no way to avoid it in your day-to-day work (memory was so tight and processors were so slow you had to understand how what you wrote affected performance).
