Apple's Swift language - first impressions

Just a quick first impression.
Pros:

• Lots of language sugar, should reduce some boilerplate code

Cons:

• Deviation from JSON format see to be arbitrary decision. Why not 

let people = {"Anna": 67, "Beto": 8, "Jack": 33, "Sam": 25}

• Plenty other seemingly arbitrary decisions that are not intuitive. E.g. 
• Use let to make a constant and var to make variable (why not const vs var?)
• func getName() -> String, why not func getName() : String?
• The biggest problem probably is still same as Object-C, you learn it to only write client program for one vendor's hardware. Will Swift ever be open and adopted on server side or other vendors?