Well yes, but "embedded" is a pretty broad category. Some major cases are: - High-volume and cost-driven: where a you're picking the cheapest MCU you can make

Well yes, but "embedded" is a pretty broad category. Some major cases are: - High-volume and cost-driven: where a you're picking the cheapest MCU you can make work (often by a matter of cents).You want to squeeze every last bit of performance (or IO, or power consumption, or pinout, or whatever the drivers are). - Real-time: where abstracting the hardware beyond a certain point is counter-productive. In my experience it's much less common that you don't care about the hardware than the reverse.