I tried to get into micros with PIC. The 16 series chips had to be burned using a burner and the code had to be written in assembly. That was very difficult since assembly really isn't intuitive. With Arduino being USB and a free C compiler, I've been able to write code and learn very quickly. This forum, the playground, and the main arduino site have also made me very successful in writing programs and building circuits that would not have been possible for me with PIC. It has opened up a huge set of possibilities for me.