It's been less than a year since the acquisition announcement, so I'm not surprised. I imagine most of the original Atmel employees are still in Norway, while the original Microchip employees are in Arizona. Most of Microchip's big customers would probably prefer that the existing 8-bit toolchains be properly maintained instead of spending resources on making a new toolchain. You can
use a PICkit 2 to program AVRs but that didn't have anything to do with the merger
.
--David