> Does anyone have an actual copy of the "The truth about AVR" as
    > I would like to read what microchip had to say.

It wasn't worth reading.
It's to microchip's credit that they got rid of it.

The best point made against the AVR, IIRC, was that Atmel measured
program memory in bytes (with two bytes per instruction), and microchip
measaured program memory in words (of assorted odd widths.)  So a 1K
atmel avr holds as many instructions as a 512word PIC.  (these days it's
also cheaper than a 512 word PIC...)

BillW