Oh dear, having read all that I feel completely put off. Sounds like major work to get the whole thing up and running,
It's a setup process, just get througth it once and you will never have to do it again.
then there is some doubt as to whether it will work on the Intel Mac anyway,
Which doubt?
and finally when I have written my application there doesn't appear to be a simple way to distribute it.
You don't have to distribute Lazarus IDE with your software, so it's easier. If you use Qt or carbon interfaces you don't have to install X11, Fink or anything like that to run your software.
We are working on improving the install process, so it doesn't require X11 or Fink. Lazarus will move it's stable distribution to Gtk 2 in the not so long future, and at that point I hope someone will provide a compiled Gtk 2 that doesn't require X11 or Fink to be installed. With this, the IDE would be free from Fink and X11.
Perhaps it would be easier to (re-)learn C++ and code in the XCode environment?
Those dependencies you mentioned have nothing to do with the language. If you created a Gtk based app on C++ it would be as hard to install as Lazarus.
Not to mention that Lazarus produced software can be recompiled natively on each platform, differently from a c++ gtk software that will always need Gtk to be installed, or a Carbon or Cocoa app which simply won't work outside Mac OS X
And you can write a Carbon app on Pascal, and you can write Pascal software on XCode and not use Lazarus IDE too. Or if you use Lazarus, you don't have to use the form designer and Lazarus Component Library.