I've never got on with them, sure people have done some impressive stuff with them, but we've consigned (barring a couple of design we did recently) 8 bit micros to history. Incidentally, the USB on the pics is good, LOADS of endpoints on them which is something that our favoured ARM processor is lacking.

I've also never found a C compiler that works properly, I normally end up finding incorrect code generation almost immediately, I don't have time to hand hold the compiler with every line of code I write and given the problems with incorrect code generation I'd be very worried about what could lurk inside shipping firmware.

The last compiler I used was microchips own C compiler and I managed to get that to generate incorrect code with a convoluted type cast after only a few hours of coding, not a good start.

I've never personally seen a single compiler problem with gcc for arm and the development environment I use (crossworks) is fantastic, I seriously have no idea how people use MPLAB because after 2 minutes of using it I was ready to tear my hair out...seriously...it's 2009 and they have workspace and project windows as MDI children rather than as separate panes.

I'll concede that most of my gripes come not from the PIC micro itself but from the supporting tools. Rowley do have a version of crossworks for pic and I'm assuming it's probably of the same quality as crossworks for ARM, so if I ever need to use a PIC in anger again they'll probably be getting an order from us, but thankfully I should never have to touch the source to the firmware on the PIC stuff ever again.