What are good microcontrollers available today?
ARM is the industry standard for 32-bit controllers, although the PIC32 has some nice features. They are quite easy to use. I like the NXP LPC2000 and LPC1000 ARM chips, but the new Energy Micro ARM Cortex-M3 chip is very interesting because of its very low power consumption - as good as the MSP430 [Youtube]. Support is very variable, the NXP chips have the LPC2000 group which I run, which people seem to like - we have over 8,000 members!