FAQ 5.1 points out that iterators are not implemented as pointers. They are a generalization of pointers, but they are implemented in libstdc++ as separate classes.

Keeping that simple fact in mind as you design your code will prevent a whole lot of difficult-to-understand bugs.

You can think of it the other way 'round, even. Since iterators are a generalization, that means that pointers are iterators, and that pointers can be used whenever an iterator would be. All those functions in the Algorithms chapter of the Standard will work just as well on plain arrays and their pointers.

That doesn't mean that when you pass in a pointer, it gets wrapped into some special delegating iterator-to-pointer class with a layer of overhead. (If you think that's the case anywhere, you don't understand templates to begin with...) Oh, no; if you pass in a pointer, then the compiler will instantiate that template using T* as a type, and good old high-speed pointer arithmetic as its operations, so the resulting code will be doing exactly the same things as it would be doing if you had hand-coded it yourself (for the 273rd time).

How much overhead is there when using an iterator class? Very little. Most of the layering classes contain nothing but typedefs, and typedefs are "meta-information" that simply tell the compiler some nicknames; they don't create code. That information gets passed down through inheritance, so while the compiler has to do work looking up all the names, your runtime code does not. (This has been a prime concern from the beginning.)