C++ already contains "top" and "bottom" C++. You can write boost-style code, with heavy use of smart_ptr and STL algorithms & functors, or you can stay pretty close to the "C with classes" layer.
That's the thing I like most about C++. I can do any type of programming in it (OOP, functional, procedural, templates, etc.). I can roll my own data structures or use the built-in STL containers while working with low-level C-like code. I'm not sure why so many people complain about it. Once I began using it, it quickly became my primary programing tool on Unix, Windows and Macs.
"Beware the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy." -- Alan Perlis
C++ is, for many people, a Turing Tarpit: Ask yourself why you wouldn't write something in assembly, and that's why they wouldn't write it in C++.
In specific, C++ doesn't have built-in support for real garbage collection. This means a lot of the idioms I take for granted in languages like Common Lisp and Haskell, to pick two very different languages that have true gc in common, are effectively impossible in C++.
For example, I can't reliably pass complex data structures around using function composition (think f(g(h(x)))) because I can't rely on them existing from one function call to the next; an allocation may have failed somewhere up the line and now what? Adding in all the code needed to handle that isn't just a pain, it obscures the algorithm to the point I'm not programming the same way anymore. I'm not even thinking the same way anymore.
Now for a purely personal anecdote: I quite like C. I can do certain things in C about as fast as I can think of them (mostly, things involving the POSIX API and no really complex data structures). I occasionally get the notion to add some C++ to my bag of tricks; not C-With-Classes, but C++ with Boost and the STL and whatever else g++ can handle these days. I might as well learn to swim by jumping in 500 feet upstream of Niagara Falls; there's "hitting the ground running", there's "hitting the ground doing back-flips and double-somersaults", and then there's "hitting the ground juggling sharpened sabres and gently convincing hungry wolves to not eviscerate you." Honestly, it wasn't this hard to learn how to write macros in Common Lisp. I don't know if the problem is just me or if it really is that bizarre in C++-land.
C++ is the wrong choice for many applications, and I'll reach for a higher-level language if I can, but if you need the low-level control of C and need some tools for better abstraction C++ is your only real option.