Arrays are pointers. If they aren't pointers then you need to copy the data when you are giving an array as a function parameter. that's a lot slower. Being able to prepare an set of data in an array and then giving a pointer to a function is very useful. You could add a second type of array on top of what you have in C that includes more stuff, but if that's what you want you can implement that yourself with a struct.
An array is not a pointer. These are completely different data types. For example, you can't apply pointer arithmetic to arrays without casting them to pointers.