The value in the Arduino is not necessarily in the actual processor, but in the tools, documentation, tutorials and library supplied with the boards. And of course in its large community of users and addons ('shields').

Plus the whole "open source hardware" thing...

It does a hell of a lot more than what the propeller can. The chip they use has on-board ADCs and DACs, which makes it a lot easier to interface with analog signals out of the box. It also has a lot more RAM, DMA access so you don't need to use CPU clocks to pull things in and out of memory, support for pretty much any bus you need -- on-board USB slave and host, SPI, I2C, CAN, etc -- for talking to anything in the world. The Propeller was an interesting chip 6 years ago, but the world's more than caught up and surpassed it, with its only saving grace being that it's a cheap multicore chip, but even then, the XMOS chips are far more interesting there.

Yes and what we could do in an FPGA in 1998...

True, but FPGAs are harder to code for, and more expensive. I work with both platforms and find them about as easy to code on, with the Prop costing a little less but requiring external parts to do ADC/DAC.

FPGAs have gotten pretty cheap nowadays. They also aren't that difficult to program if you know Verilog.

we have made a A3P250 FPGA board, with build-in USB interface, total cost of building the board is less than $50, can do a ton of things MCU can not do. would anyone want it if we commercialize it? http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0117/1482/products/IMG_0305... The design was based on http://skywired.net/blog/projects/a3pn250-fpga-breakout-boar..., added regulator chips, got rid of the power-on-reset chips.

If you're not sure, you could start a Kickstarter. That's what it's for - products which are only viable if a certain number of people put down cash.

How does the actel toolkit compare with the xilinx toolkit?