With the Philips LPC210X series in the last year, and also with the Atmel SAM7 series, the costs of the ARM7 development tools and compilers for ARM devices continue to come down. It won't be long before ARM7 will make a cost effective platform for learning of embedded computing. They will start to make Rabbit micro look very out of date which it actualy already is. PIC 16 series... Don't even mention it.
regards, Johnny.