Right, the fact that arrays aren't pointers is academic when they decay to pointers at the drop of a hat. In fact it's so easy to decay the array to a pointer that it is generally best to always treat it as a pointer lest you get burned later on during a code refactor. This mostly means never using sizeof() to get the size of an array.
Even if we simplify it this way, arrays are still different because they cannot be assigned to and their decayed pointer can never be NULL (they always have a backing storage provided by the compiler):
int arr[5];
int *ptr;
// "arr" has a fixed backing storage of sizeof(int) * 5 bytes
// "ptr" may point to anything or be NULL, depending on control flow
Best to check for NULL anyway though, because anything can happen once you let it decay to a pointer. Never assigning them is a good idea though, maybe it's best to think of them as constant pointers? But that's more confusing terminology for a C programmer, so maybe not. People get really wrapped around the axle when differentiating a constant pointer from a pointer to a constant.
