Yes, I completely agree. I had a client that pushed for a large enterprise application to be written in C++. By large, I mean it took a ~30 person team about 3 years to develop. In the end, I think the 80/20 rule applied and well under 20% of the code was performance critical while the rest was handling common operations that in higher level languages would either be easy or part of a standard library. On top of that, once the client wanted to take over the project they had a hell of a time finding competent C++ developers.

Back in 2005 two Microsoft developers (Raymond Chen and Mariani) did a blog series where one of them wrote and optimized a C++ Chinese/English dictionary and the other did the same in C#[0]. The naïve C# version outperformed the C++ version until Raymond performed several significant optimizations.

[0]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2005/05/10/416151.aspx