I think it's unintuitive because it's taught in that unintuitive way of just saying "zero is first." I know we can't get too terribly deep into this stuff with esp. young children, but we can at least gently introduce them to the concept of offset v. ordinal, as the former is a much more intuitive way to actually
understand array indexes. Trying to liken indexes to ordinal numbers just promotes rote memorization, which is already time which would be better spent on other things.
I've come to feel that "arrays are pointers with offsets" is a largely-irrelevant justification for promoting zero-based indexes in today's programming landscape. Looking at the TIOBE top 10 programming languages for this month, 6 of 10 languages don't even offer a way to address memory with numeric pointers (and that climbs to 8/10 if you rule .NET as "pointers are technically available, but not commonly used and are somewhat discouraged").
If I grab JS/Java/Python/PHP, an array/list is a magic sequence of values with opaque under-the-hood operations, and my only interface to it is the item index. In that context, promoting idioms because they make mechanical sense in a language I'm not using doesn't seem compelling.
