AVR-Chat

I noticed a strange new microcontroller called PICAXE in one of the
catalogues i got from Austronics 2005 last week.

After some googling, i found out that PICAXE is actually a PIC with a
bootstrap code from the manufacturer.

Does anyone have ever used PICAXE before? Selling micros with useful
bootstrap codes for easy development is an interesting idea though. I
wonder if there are AVR-AXEs or something like that.

-irfan-
ps: why is AVR much more expensive than PIC in australia? it's the
other way around in indonesia :(