I wil probably get slammed for saying this on a Pic forum, but I think that Arduino is going to be great for you. The development toolkit package they have developed for it free and easy to use. It contains many library features that work right out of the box. It hides all the nasty set-up of the chip and auto-inserts it for you at compile time. It was designed by people who didn't want to get burdened down with learning the chip internals and all the nasty stuff you have to do to accomplish commonly done tasks. I used one in a project and was just amazed at how simple it was. I interface some pushbuttons, a dual seven segment LED display, DAC output, and several ADC inputs... had the project done coding in less than a week, even though I had never done an Atmel chip before. They have good documentation at the Arduino site and a very helpful forum group (but it worked so well I didn't need help anyway).
Oh-oh... dirty looks from the pic people... I'm edging towards the door now... here they come...
AAAAaaaaaahhhhh!