At first we had to code our own getters and setters. There was no concept of a property in Objective-C 1.0, except by the convention that if a class had a method x and a method setX: then it could have been said to have property x.
Then Apple created Objective-C 2.0 and it introduced the @property and @synthesise directives, as well as the dot notation. And the number of getters and setters we had to write was reduced to near zero. And our getters and setters become correct in the face of concurrency (assuming no nonatomic) which set us up well for the days of multicore CPUs and GCD.
And the people programming in the land of Apple were happy. (Well generally, some have some valid objections to dot notation).
So yeah, it's just syntax. But I'd highly recommend you use it, unless you have strong reasons not to.