The whole point of what I said is that "hard" is a difficult thing to judge. For some tasks and some languages recursion is much easier to understand, teach and use. Just take the good ol' classical example of quicksort in Haskell or fibonacci in Lisp.

Some people can grok recursion in a functional programming language much faster and more easily than they would understand the concept of branching, variable assignment (with mutability) and non-pure functions (what we used to call "procedures" back in the day).