You could make the same kind of criticisms, but not with the same strength. there are real quantitative differences between the speed of explicit malloc/free and even a really nice garbage collector. (Unless you have a very special allocation pattern, like a whole lot of short-lived allocations and a generational garbage collector that uses stop-and-copy for the nursery generation. That's like the best possible case for GC.)
1 - a whole lot of OO and functional Lisp programs use your "very special" pattern of short lived allocations.
2 - You can rig the game so generational GC beats malloc/free.
3 - It's not a criticism, it's a general principle. One always pays for performance. If your performance requirements are low enough, you can even take out a loan on them, so to speak, by using a more expressive language.
