A good example tends to be followed...
Anyway; I downloaded the MikroC free edition before (last year, very recent) to see what's what, and I wasn't seeing much benefit from MPLAB X:
- I can't see why a Pickit2 isn't supported. It should do the same thing as PK3 on most devices. You either need a PK3 or their very expensive hardware, which is as big as a paving stone for working with a 10x10mm chip.
You can use a PK2 with the standalone util to flash some chips, but that doesn't do debugging..
- I hate the closed-ness of libraries. I always like to step through and see what's going on. You can't always rely that a library is written in a way it won't interfere with other stuff you may possibly be doing. And you won't figure out without seeing whats going on. So: either reading the source, or reverse engineering the generated assembly code to check out what's going on. Reverse engineering assembler stuff (on an embedded system) is a bitch.
- You still need to set-up DMA stuff yourself, which is ironic in that it makes a lot of things easier, except some of the very 'hard' specialized stuff which can make it harder (because you can't see/edit their library code, huuray!).
- The code editor looked really simple. That may be a good thing for some, but I like my auto completion, re factoring, coding style rules, renaming, indentation, doc generation/helpers tools on my IDE. Therefor, I usually create a dummy-C project in VS2010 Express or EasyEclipse C/C++ and work in there because of the features.
I can't tell anything about the compiler quality itself. Although,for example, it won't be hard to beat the XC8 lite edition, which is so terrible it's obviously bloating your program just to make the PRO version seem worth it (woohoo 40% code size reduction), although that's just a casual compiler.
I also find it miraculous you can tell all about how great this IDE is and it's capacities and then ask what programmer/debugger to buy so you can actually use the IDE properly.
I think you can safely say Mikroe is Apple-sort-of from the electronics market. Their site/design looks really clean, simple and straight forward with lots of stuff to get going easily for anyone. But their price tag is huge, it's all closed off, and in the end, you can accomplish the same result with other tools (albeit with a bit more effort, which may be more satisfying when it works).
And you will always have fanboys and haters. I may be more of a hater, or pessimistic.