Verbosity doesn't mean long method names. In this case it means header files, primitive types vs objects, poor collection support, and manual memory management. Smalltalk does a better job in all of those areas.
Smalltalk has equally long method names in many places... see some of the morphic libraries... ObjC is basically naming type parameters. I don't think their (ObjC) collection support is too bad either. Also, the manual memory management only exists on the iPhone, if you use ObjC on the desktop, it comes with a garbage collector.
Which is what makes it even worse: it's not that they can't do it on the iPhone, it's that they won't.
And why not? It can't be a question of RAM: Java has had GC back when the average home computer had half the memory available in the first gen iPhone. Nor can it be efficiency: most GCs these days are efficient enough for the average program, and a developer can always disable it if she prefers manual memory allocation.
My point is that it just ends up being yet another example of Apple making arbitrary restrictions that do little for performance or user experience, while causing a lot of pain for developers.
The Newton had a garbage collector with NewtonScript. And the Newton only had something like 640kB of RAM.
Although, I don't think the decision to leave it out was arbitrary or solely to piss off developers. Apple likely wants to have as little code duplication as possible, so they're not going to add it in until the iPhone/iPad has enough ram free so that game developers don't have to worry about when the GC will run. My guess (and lots of emphasis on guess) is that this will happen when support for the iPhone 3G is dropped.
Yes more so than Smalltalk. While both have unary and keyword messages, the messages in the Cocoa APIs are generally much more verbose than their Smalltalk analogues. Compare insertObject:atIndex: from NSMutableArray with at:put: from Smalltalk's Array, OrderedCollection, and Dictionary.
Also, Smalltalk has binary messages (with which arithmetic is implemented), which allows for the creation of useful shortcuts like "," for collection concatenation and "@" for point creation. Smalltalk has precedence levels associated with its message syntax; Objective-C doesn't, hence [the [bracket soup]]. Smalltalk also has an extremely concise block closure syntax and no need for header and object files or special function/class declaration syntax.
And this is a function of the libraries used with the language, not the language itself.