Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's relative, and it's a distinction that changes as we make progress. Objective-C is a higher-level language than C, but as you noted, it's not interpreted, and I don't think it would be very pleasant to use as an interpreted language. It is verbose and repetitive (for example, to add a property to an Objective-C class requires you to add three lines of code in three separate places in your source code). And apart…
I don't think being interpreted matters. It may make your immediate development cycle faster, but that says nothing about long term development. I imagine the Scala guys would argue heavily that being compiled is a huge advantage to the power of that language, and would also strongly disagree that it isn't a high level language. Objective-C properties are poorly done in my opinion, though you can add one in two lines…
I like to quote Peter Norvig on the subject of interpreted languages. But in his quote, he uses "interactive." Maybe that's a better word:
"Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it." - Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
I've seen Objective-J and generally have good feelings about Javascript. But it's not particularly strong on one other criteria that I like to apply, which is that it should be easy to mix code written at different language levels.