It reminds me of one of Bertrand Myer's many criticisms of C++ that I read in his book on Eiffel. (Almost every page of his book made fun of C++ in some way -- it was a delightful read!)
He pointed out that there was no reason for C++ to have both "." and "->", because the compiler always knew which one was required, and it only gave the programmer the opportunity to make a mistake, and a lot of extra effort changing every line of code if you change your mind about whether to use a pointer or not.
The definition of whether a member is a pointer or an inlined struct/object should only be one place in the code: in the class declaration, not scattered around every line of code in the program that uses it.
C++'s excuse was that it was trying to be compatible with C. Of course Java side-stepped the problem by not supporting embedded structs, but C# got it right.
