Is there any reason why basic math operations don't work with cell arrays? Seems to me it would extremely useful and efficient if you could do the following:
Cell arrays are designed for containing objects of different types and sizes. They are a fundamentally inefficient way to hold objects that are all the same size, partly because their contents are not guaranteed to be held contiguously in RAM. Because a better data type is usually available for the situations you describe, TMW hasn't bothered to define such operations for cells. You could write cell-like class with overloaded arithmetic operations if you wished, but it would be syntactic sugar, and nothing more.
For the scenario in your example, moreover, the best method is in any case a simple for loop. This accomplishes the whole operation with just 3 multiplications with A, unlike the approach you presented which first forms Apow.
out=cell(1,4);
out{1}=C;
for i=2:4
out{i}=out{i-1}*A;
end
out=out(2:end);
