It's not just that the to/from is a hassle, it's also that you have to deeply understand the gotchas of ASCIIZ strings to safely do that bridging at all --- so pretending it doesn't exist is probably not a good teaching strategy. (I have no opinion about the article and am only commenting on this thread because I like C).
I do not pretend anything about null-terminated strings in the book. In fact, I have many exercises and assignments where they use Valgrind to buffer overflow C strings repeatedly and don't introduce bstring until much later.
