I disagree about Objective-C being a pain. When I was doing osx development. Desktop and iPhone, I liked it. You do not have to use Eclipse at all! I use maven

I disagree about Objective-C being a pain. When I was doing osx development. Desktop and iPhone, I liked it. You do not have to use Eclipse at all! I use maven and the community edition of IntelliJ IDEA. But I could also use Netbeans. Or a simple text editor. For the GUI you can use DroidDraw. And you do not have to use Java. You can use Scala. Although I would recommend using Java until you are familiar with the APIs and concepts.