I find myself increasingly not using my Arduino stuff, the problem is I want to use it for complex things, and it just isn't as much fun.
My weapon of choice, 10 years ago was always a PIC micro, I prefered them to the Atmel, and I'd mostly write in MASM using my own IDE that provided some useful additions to the macros I normally used (branch highlighting etc).
This was great for hobby stuff, stuff only I'm working on. I know precisely how long an instruction or macro will take, I can make really accurate timings. Great! I even got an In Circuit Debugger.
I can't really drop down to that stuff on an Arduino, so I'll end up with a few PICs for doing the signals interfacing stuff, ok that's fine. But that means I'm normally wanting more of the 'intelligent' uC.
Which is why I like my .Net Fez board. It's great for hobbiests, whilst the TinyCLR is frustratingly behind .Net, it's still better than Java in many ways.
However, I look at the price of that, and I look at a mobile phone. I can happily talk to a PIC via the audio jack for most things. I've got a brilliant touch screen, controller, wifi and enough memory to run complex things written in a high level language. It even has a battery too.
Which is why I can't help but feel there is a missing trick with hobby micro electronics at the moment, more effort should be around re-purposing the ultra cheap hardware that is a mobile phone.
Backed. Event loop driven uC programming is a lot easier than working with an OS for very simple things. They even make pretty decent wifi modules that let you can interface with over UART. It would make measuring and dialing home with results easy for a one off.
Have them use an Arduino or something with a nice older-person-friendly IDE and run a serial line to their windows box or something.