PIC’s banked memory addressing is circa 1980.
PIC’s lack of a real stack is just absurd.
AVR and most other prudent microprocessors do not have these limitations.
You normally don’t have to bother about banked memory with the 18F PICs. The 16 bit PICs have a proper stack and the memory isn’t banked.
Leon
With all the low cost ARM microcontrollers why bother of both PICs or AVRs ? price ? code size ? performance ? power ? easy of use ?
Power consumption, overall system cost, ease of use?
Leon
I think the really clear advantage of AVRs over PICs is WinAVR, which is a set of free, open source tools for developing C code for AVRs. It rivals, IMHO, the tools that cost thousands of dollars. Last I checked PICs did not have anything like this.
PICs, OTOH, have a very, very wide range of parts, while there are far fewer AVRs.
But WinAVR wins me over.
Microchip gives away free ‘student’ versions of their C18 and C30 compilers (the latter is based on gcc). The main things missing are a few optimisations. The full versions aren’t very expensive.
Leon
I’ve misplaced my Atmel “My Microprocessor can beat the Hell out of Your Microprocessor” sticker 
I don’t think it much matters. Whatever your comfy with. I started with AVR for the simple reason that I could build my own ‘no parts’ programmer and BascomAVR Basic compiler had a nice non-expiring demo (which is actually very nice and I highly recommend it). I am just now starting ARM and C.
I did find [this AVR vs PIC comparison to be rather unbiased.](http://onut.net/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=25)