it as it has no support for linux.
I have to admit that multiple host operating systems was one of the first things that attracted me to Arduino. I mean, it's POSSIBLE to do PIC and AVR development on Mac/etc, given virtual box this and Wine that and Fink the third thing and fiddle with the source to the fourth thing till it compiles, and maybe MacPort the other thing. But it was annoyingly ... annoying.
Arduino was trivial; even pleasant.
I haven't quite figured out why the Arduino environment hasn't become the sort-of-linux for small microcontrollers. (linux is great for vendors of larger CPU. Do a little bit of work and you get to demo a whole operating system, without having to license or agree to much of anything.) I guess gcc is a pretty high bar, and arduino doesn't really show off an individual products capabilities that well. But still; the landscape includes many architectures that already have gcc support (ARM being the big example, but also PIC32 (MIPS), MSP430, Coldfire, and some of those Renesas H8 chips.) Maybe in another couple of years.