I think personally I would want bronze = bronze. It's heavy, and it's a little soft. One rough fight and you're sword is bent, and you've got to find a couple flat rocks to pound it back into shape. Tempering, pattern welding, shaping and folding...these are alien concepts. Once the bronze cools in the mold it's as strong as it's ever going to be.
Iron and steel are bizarre based on what everyone knows about metal. It takes astonishing amounts of heat to melt, far more than anything you know of can generate. It's hard, and it's strong, and it's strangely flexible. It also rots if you don't care for it, slowly turning orange red and flaking away to nothing.
I think for me the alien-ness that PhilHibbs describes is less about changing the properties of things, and more about shifting how we think about them. It's not easy to slip free of modern perspectives though, so his view may well be the right one for a lot of people.