RE I2C:

PBP doesn't have any provisions for using the I2C hardware. But of course you can manipulate the registers directly. Using the hardware in the MASTER mode doesn't give a huge benefit over bit-banging unless you are really moving a lot of data and are using interrupts.
If you need an I2C slave, then hardware is virtually the only way to go. I posted an interrupt-driven slave awhile back that works well.

With all the "noise" that has been made over I2C recently, I would be very surprised if the next (minor) update of PBP didn't have more support for I2C hardware.