A blog reader posted an interesting comment referring to a video praising C++ of Ale Contenti, Principal Development Manager with the Windows C++ team at Microsoft.
In the video available on Channel 9 and also on this blog post, Ale covers the reasons why you might want to use native code (some of which also apply to Delphi) rather than managed code (even if he never directly mentions .NET claims you might want to manage memory directly), talks about the commitment of Microsoft for Visual C++, highlights coming IDE features (mostly tied to ALM and "visualization"... that is UML kind of views).
Although making a video to tell C++ is not dead for Microsoft is not a terribly good sign, the video is interesting... (to me also because I found out about Ale, who studied at my same University in Italy, but a few years after myself). I suggest you to have also a look to some of the comments at both locations...
PS: in case you don't know, I started both professional programming and book writing around C++, before Delphi was invented.