Sometimes I think the higher end embedded chips are even more fun, because you have an FPGA with shared memory to the processor and tons of IO pins. You can do some truly ridiculous things, including emulating other processors in the fpga fabric hehe.
I haven't tried FPGAs yet, just doing basic AVR programming with GCC-AVR and avrdude. Do FPGAs have an open source/hobby community around them like AVR does? I have heard bad things about FPGA companies being old fashioned/secretive.