Hi, 

I thought Microchip made a hostile takeover of atmel a long time ago. I don't expect it will change anything although the chipKIT range of boards is now Arduino compatible.

In some ways Arduino is a loose term these days and it stands for a common set of methods that allow code to run on any processor and for most users it avoids the need for low level code. Low level code prevents the entire concept from working because you can't just click and switch your project to another board (such as SAMD, chipKIT, esp8266 or a Ti board).

This is another reason why I recommend Visual Studio over any specific hardware manufacturers Ide. The Arduino projects that Visual Micro produces are Arduino Ide compatible (unless you put code in sub folders or use local project libraries). Visual Micro is compatible with the Arduino Ide which, as you know, suffers from some incompatibility with Atmel studio when it comes to AVRDUDE usb drivers. So both Visual Micro and the Arduino Ide can function better without the confusion of the Atmel Jungo drivers.

It's also possible to extend the Arduino Ide by adding custom hardware or programmers. Both Visual Micro and the Arduino Ide share the same config. So when it works in the Arduino Ide it will work in Visual Micro. This means that normal Arduino development can be performed with intellisense and without loosing compatibility with other Arduino developers.

In both the Arduino Ide and with Visual Micro we can make use of the published mechanism for manufacturers to add new supported hardware. This is a relatively new extension to the Arduino build system and you can see the current hardware list here.

The hardware list is maintained by arduino.cc but as you can see other manufacturers can add to it. It "should" be possible to compile most Arduino code for any of the hardware listed on the page which would not be the case if people used native architecture code.

Having said that some uses demand more efficiency, so it's not wrong to use fixed platform code but projects do become much more complex. At that point one has to question why be constrained by the simple rapid dev features of Arduino? It isn't this complexity that has made Arduino so popular 

You can also see in Visual Studio (for the Arduino Zero and Stellaris LM4F) that a powerful new gdb debug feature is available that should over time be compatible with more and more boards. Again the idea of cross platform tools is very exciting and it's nice to not be constrained. 

I like the PIC dev tools but not as much as Visual Studio. More importantly I hope PIC provide gdb at some point. The PIC hardware is very good (excellent) but often appear to sit outside of the mainstream. I am watching the chipKIT hardware closely. I see they just published to the arduino hardware list during the last month or so.