what is the different between PIC micro-controller vs Arduino ?
No one has said this yet, so I guess I will:
A "PIC microcontroller" is a chip (actually, a broad range of chips encompassing three different architectures and hundreds of different configurations.)
"Arduino" is a board-level hardware product and accompanying development environment. It plugs directly into a USB port on your computer, and allows you to start writing high-level language programs pretty much immediately
To get the "PIC Microcontroller" to be like an Arduino, you need a board that holds the chip and provides USB communications, and you need PC-side software including a compiler. These things do exist, at least for some subsets of the PIC microcontrollers. But a random PIC microcontroller chip by itself is pretty distant from an Arduino.
People have already mentioned the chipKit boards, which use an arduino-compatible IDE. They're swell; more powerful than Arudinos of similar cost, just as easy to use, and reasonably well supported. They don't have the community of the Arduino; they're a couple years behind. The USB bitwhacker is another example; it actually showed up at about the same time as the original USB Arduinos, but it didn't include development software (you had to use the stuff provided by Microchip.) There's also JALuino, which uses an alternative high-level languag ("JAL")
PICAXE I'd actually categorize a bit differently, since it's interpretted (slower) and is thus dependent on buying the chips (containing the PICAXE interpreter) from the PICAXE people. A big strength of the Arduino-like systems is that they operate on "bare-metal chips" with all open-source libraries. (That doesn't mean that they're not a useful product! Just somewhat different.)
