My story is a little different. PIC was forced on me. As a designer, I used to work with 8051 family components till one day a client came to me with a board designed for him by someone else using a PIC16C54 which had then migrated to 16F84. I needed to re-do the project on a 16F628 and add some more features. There was no source code to fall back on. Starting from scratch, I had to learn about the PIC and get the board to work and perhaps better the compliance to specs. Today the product line is mature and gives very good battery efficiency using sleep mode operation. This exercise, forced on me, helped me a lot and today, I just love to use PICs wherever there is a low power requirement.

A similar story with the cypress PSoC happened, and so now I do 8051/PIc/PSoC and a little bit of ARM too. But, mainly development of new products is on PIC/PSoC/8051 in that order.

Jerson