This stackoverflow message talks about the specs for C11, and the first comment adds information on the C++03 spec. It seems that implicit cast from integer to boolean is allowed... under all circumstances... depending on what specification the compiler is following :D
For future references, I'll just summarize this as "C and C++ are minefields". We'll just add that to the list of WTF behaviors.
By the way, if you think that "C has had bool for 19 years" [the C99 spec specifically]. You clearly didn't work in C for long enough with a large variety of tools. The world is bigger than just GCC.
I imagine the warning is following the rules for explicit constructors/operators in C++: an if condition is considered an "explicit" call to an `operator bool`. http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/explicit