Are most criticisms of C++ thinly veiled, "it's too hard for me" excuses? All my profs speak highly of C++ and emphasize the importance of learning it to make high performance applications. Stack Overflow seems to like it as well.
Just wait a year or two and Go will become the best higher level language. Even now, when it's in a rapid development pre-release state, its executables are smaller than statically compiled C++, it compiles way faster than C++, you need to write less code for the same program, has GC, has easy to use concurrency and multithreading, better compile error messages, better syntax and semantics, is about Java fast (and it will get faster), ...