Is it important to teach pointers in a first course using Java?
Learning about references is important, but I don't feel that learning about pointers is that important for beginning Java students. Certainly intermediate students will need to understand them.

When I started learning about pointers, I had a hard time grasping them at all until I learned assembly language. Once I learned assembly (for any processor), pointers made sense. It helped that I learned PDP-11 assembly at about the same time I learned C.  Since C is essentially structured PDP-11 assembly language, I was easily able to see the relationship between the pointer structures and the compiled code.

Java hides the concept of a pointer sufficiently deeply that I would be hard pressed to explain it with java. I can explain java structures in terms of pointers, but have difficulty expressing it the other way around. For teaching pointers and pointer concepts, I would probably use C (yep - plain old C, without the ++) and the x86 assembly language as a starting point.

After that, it's easy to explain that the JVM is built in C, and java object references are implemented as pointers.