these seems to make a friend of mine believe that pic is a better choice for products!
What makes a better choice for a product is price / availability and fit to the solution. PICs followed a route many years ago of selling their development systems very cheaply and thus generating a generation of young engineers who were conformable using it. In my opinion the architecture of the main PIC processors is long past it's sell by date. And a lot of PIC development was in assembler only as a C compiler was expensive.
This same route is being trod by the ATMEGA, it has the advantage of a a free compiler. However at the end of the day it is only an 8 bit processor so there are many tasks it is not suited for.
It actually makes little difference what processor you use if it is suited to the task. I understand what you are trying to do but there is no point in doing this as in the end professionally you will use what is in the interest of the business.