Chagrin:
There will always be tons of situations where just a simple microcontroller is warranted and AVR chips will always have their place there.
While I agree that micontrollers will have a place for quite some time, I'm not as
sure about the 8 bit AVRs. I find it increasing painful to deal with when there are other
chips out there that are the same price point like the pic32 that have oodles more
of everything on them, are 32 bit, MUCH faster and don't have the all the split memory
progmem issues.
I mean consider this, if you had your choice, and the cost was the same,
would you pick an 8 bit processor that runs at 16 Mhz with 32k flash, 2k ram, and a funky split
address space where C const data doesn't work
or would you pick a 32 bit processor that runs at 50 Mhz, with 128k of flash, 32k ram,
lots more i/o and peripherals including native USB AND C const data works.
The point is that other much better chips than the 8 bit AVRs are now already available
for the same cost - including in DIP packages,
so I believe that people will start to migrate away from the 8 bit AVRs and eventually leave them behind.
I would bet that if the Arduino were starting to day, it would use a PIC32MX250f128B
rather than the Atmega8.
--- bill