> Can someone fill me in as to why gcc has not been ported to pic micro when
> there are 68HC11 ports even.  Is it purely because of the architectural
> differences

Mostly.  GCC assumes a Von Neuman machine architecture and a general-purpose
stack, both of which attributes are applicable to the 68HC11 but not the PIC.

The PIC is fairly unsuited to C code in general (i.e., there aren't
addressing modes to efficiently support local variables on stack frames),
so it is probably better to use a compiler whose back end was designed from
the ground up for the PIC, than to try to write a suitable PIC machine
description for GCC's backend.

The new PIC18 series will be rather more amenable to supporting high-level
languages than the current PICs, but I still don't expect to see a GCC
port.

I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but my rule of thumb for nearly ten
years has been:

  If it's worth doing on a PIC, it's worth doing in PIC assembly language.