What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings but it's handled completely transparently).

If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.