For developers completely new to iOS, is this a good starting point or we better skip straight to Swift?
If you're doing development for yourself or your own edification, though, you could totally skip Objective-C. It might be worth it to get an overview of the syntax so you can read StackOverflow answers and tutorials about Apple's APIs (which are by far the biggest part of learning iOS dev), but otherwise skipping straight to Swift should be fine.
For better or worse, I think Swift is trying to play the same game as Scala—being just enough OO and just enough FP to get everyone on board. I think it's an exciting space (I'm personally quite convinced that OO and FP represent roughly dual things and that there's a happy medium somewhere) but it also means there will be a longish period as "Swift style" is developed and propagated.
So for all of those reasons, I think it's worth sticking with ObjC for a while unless you like a little bit of pain and want to be on the bleeding edge.