I started with PICs and now use both PICs and Arduino. There's advantages to both, which you prefer is up to you. For PIC I use MPLAB X with MPLAB XC compilers. I also use a PICKit 3 but this has been superseded by PICKit 4 so if you are starting out with PIC probably get one of those. There are other development tools available but I've not tried them.
As others have commented, the thing you are going to have to learn is how to drive the hardware. Pretty much everything you need to know to drive a serial port or a pin is done for you with the Arduino IDE. With PIC you will have to study the data sheet to see how to drive the hardware you want to use. If you want something like the serial monitor you'll have to write your own. Tip: I always include 3 LEDs on my projects, I turn them on and off in the code I am having problems with to give me an indication of whether the code has got to a particular place or not. Another tip: if you want to use print in any form don't buy a PIC with 8k of flash memory; print uses almost all of it leaving little or no space for anything else.
I suggest you buy one of the 18F PICs, probably doesn't matter too much which one (I happen to like 18F26K22) and play with it. If you can get some LEDs flashing and read some buttons you are well on your way. There is a huge range of PICs, they differ in the built in peripherals they have, they are similar in that the basic architecture is always the same, once you learn how to use one you will find the others easy.
Any C code you have that doesn't interface to hardware will probably transfer easily. However, any code that does anything at all to the hardware will have to be re-written to drive the hardware in a PIC.
Have fun!