I love flat address space, its perfect for embedded. As for IO its not that grim once you go up to fatter chips (STM32F42*). FSMC, high speed usb, 100mbit ether

I love flat address space, its perfect for embedded. As for IO its not that grim once you go up to fatter chips (STM32F42*). FSMC, high speed usb, 100mbit ethernet, dedicated camera/LCD interfaces, high speed GPIO with dma. Super cheap STM32F1xx does about 7MB/s over GPIO, almost ISA speed.