Why can’t a get-only property requirement in a protocol be satisfied by a property which conforms?

There’s no real reason why this shouldn’t be possible, a read-only property requirement can be covariant, as returning a ConformsToB instance from a property typed as ProtocolB is perfectly legal.

Swift just currently doesn’t support it. In order to do so, the compiler would have to generate a thunk between the protocol witness table and conforming implementation in order to perform the necessary type-conversion(s). For example, a ConformsToB instance would need to be boxed in an existential container in order to be typed as ProtocolB (and there’s no way the caller can do this, as it might not know anything about the implementation being called).

But again, there’s no reason why the compiler shouldn’t be able to do this. There are multiple bug reports open over this, this one which is specific to read-only property requirements, and this general one, in which Slava Pestov, a member of the Swift team, says:

[…] we want protocol witnesses and method overrides in every case where a function conversion is allowed

So it definitely looks like something the Swift team are looking to implement in a future version of the language.

In the mean time however, as @BallpointBen says, one workaround is to use an associatedtype:

protocol ProtocolA {
    // allow the conforming type to satisfy this with a concrete type
    // that conforms to ProtocolB.
    associatedtype SomeProperty : ProtocolB
    var someProperty: SomeProperty { get }
}

protocol ProtocolB {}
class ConformsToB: ProtocolB {}

class SomeClass: ProtocolA {

    // implicitly satisfy the associatedtype with ConformsToB.
    var someProperty: ConformsToB

    init(someProperty: ConformsToB) {
        self.someProperty = someProperty
    }
}

But this is quite unsatisfactory, as it means that ProtocolA is no longer usable as a type (because it has associatedtype requirements). It also changes what the protocol says. Originally it said that someProperty could return anything that conformed to ProtocolB – now it says that an implementation of someProperty deals with just one specific concrete type that conforms to ProtocolB.

Another workaround is just to define a dummy property in order to satisfy the protocol requirement:

protocol ProtocolA {
    var someProperty: ProtocolB { get }
}

protocol ProtocolB {}
class ConformsToB: ProtocolB {}

class SomeClass: ProtocolA {

    // dummy property to satisfy protocol conformance.
    var someProperty: ProtocolB {
        return actualSomeProperty
    }

    // the *actual* implementation of someProperty.
    var actualSomeProperty: ConformsToB

    init(someProperty: ConformsToB) {
        self.actualSomeProperty = someProperty
    }
}

Here we’re essentially writing the thunk for the compiler – but it’s also not particularly nice as it adds a needless property to the API.