That is exactly the point of julia. It provides you access to BLAS/LAPACK when you need it, and it still gives you something fast when vectorization is not natural. It basically does not require vectorization as a prerequisite for performance. Julia wouldn't be the first language to attempt this - Matlab does this reasonably well, but R, Octave, Scilab, etc. do not.

Julia does have multi-dimensional arrays and slicing also. If you had to do all this by hand, it would just be simpler to use C. http://julialang.org/manual/arrays/