The strongest selling point for PIC is always the quality of the I/O hardware and the attention to the low-volume market. The CPU core is just something that you need to deal with. ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets.

Lead time is always an important parameter to consider when choosing a new MCU for a low-volume project :-)

I used to start new projects looking on digikey website more than anything.