Arduino 'language' doesn't help at all. I don't see it as feature, just as there's nothing fun about programming pascal! heh..
Now, that's just me. A "clone" that you program transparently on the arduino ide sure has it uses.
The bottomline is avr-gcc vs jal or whatever... from a first impression gcc wins, you can compile c++ for instance. Jal compiles ansi C?
Also that statement that on PIC you often need to get down to asm, true?
Albeit we really should take our hats off for microchip for selling a DIP chip with HW USB, no one mentioned V-USB... which works great.
And doing a lil price research on futurlec, the PIC usb chip was $2 dollars more than a atmega32. (24 i/o - 2 for vusb). Please correct me, there are tons of models and I know nothing about pics...
And there's some libusb-ready fw for those usb enables pics? Something like LUFA?