[aceperry]

Arduino has made a huge impact on the "maker" community. It has enabled lots of non-electrical engineers to produce hardware that was previous not possible or easy for non-programmers. Most of the time, 8 bit micros are sufficient for the types of projects involved. Even embedded engineers use them when convenient.

And the ecosystem of Arduino "shields" has become so popular that lots of people and companies make shields. Even the newer environments such as ARM's mBed will accept arduino shields due to their availability.