Why would the VCC/GND pins of an ATtiny26 not be aligned?
One very good reason, as I learned myself from a recent prototype, is reversing the physical layout of the IC in a circuit.

I plugged a through-hole version of this microcontroller into a socket backwards, and spent about an hour with an oscilloscope trying to determine why pins were not behaving as expected.

When I discovered the IC was in backwards (and recovered from the desire to shoot myself), I realized I was thankful that a polarity reversal hadn't rendered the IC useless. With the pins backwards in this arrangement, the chip actually receives VCC and GND correctly in both directions.

In IC's with VCC on pin 1, and GND on the opposite corner, they heat up and generally fail very quickly when inserted backwards.