The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths.
If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html)
C is good.