First: I'm a wintel guy mostly. When something needs to run on linux, that's fine by me - I know how to do it. but for my workstation I'm quite happy with windows (server 2003 here).
I may be way off base, but when longhorn drops, most everything that you have to do API calls from .NET now will be directly into the framework. I like the framework (and I don't call 25MB a waste) because most everything I need is already there. And that makes my life easy. Interfacing with hardware is somewhat weak now, but there are managed RS232 components for sale, or you can just interop with something else (I use Io32.dll for my VFD software) and be just as dangerous as you were in the unmanaged way of doing things.
Call me lazy, but when I can do things the easy way, I will. I still program in C and ASM on microcontrollers, though
Although this is never a holy war I wish to get into, the discussion is still good.
Edit: and that chip is pretty cool. I'll take a look at the sheet in a bit more depth when I'm not at work.