I happen to prefer C++ myself, it is the more powerful and efficient option albeit slower to develop in, the only downside is, at least to me it no longer seems to be a priority in the Qt development cycle. Judging from the last Qt Developer Days QML gets like 80% of the attention and my one apprehension is eventually the C++ framework will lag behind, hopefully thou it will never come to it.
My problem with the C++ API is the GUI part uses native styling by default, which forces me to use very little of the stock components, instead subclassing the deeper abstract base classes, overloading events and so I get a GUI that looks and \behaves a bit more modern and identical across different platforms, working adequately with multi-touch and so on. If the Qt development team decides to step up and do the same to the stock GUI components this will certainly breathe more life into the C++ API, but for now, sadly, it is Qt Quick that has the priority.
JavaScript is not that hard BTW, and you can easily get away with only using it for property binding and some minimal logic, while still keeping heavy duty logic in C++.