> How much can you do in C without pointers?

Without pointers, not much. Without pointer arithmetic, lots and lots.

It's not really pointers that are hard. It's the pointers-to-base-types and pointer arithmetic that is hard. You can teach a whole lot by just ignoring the existence of these things. As long as you treat pointers to system structures and objects as opaque types, you've basically got what Java has, and nobody says Java is too hard because it uses object references.

Sooner or later you have to learn these things, but you don't have to learn them right away. The learning curve shouldn't suffer if you don't go our of your way to make it hard.