The whole 'LP line of Atmel appears to be heavily undermanaged, I wonder if it is a deliberate decision or simply incompetence or lack of motivation. It seems that there are real chips available at the North American Arrow for a couple of months now; I personally could not justify the expenses and effort to get some from there just to be able to play with them.

However, there are more alternatives, also in DIP/PLCC (although not the "classical" 40-pin pinout). The NXP P89LPC9xx line features a 2-clocker running up to 18MHz which is roughly 2-2.5x more than what you can get out of the 'ED2 and kin. Farnell stocks several models also in DIP/PLCC, although so far not the newest 5V LPC98x/LPC97x models.

Similarly to Andy I must add for the record that I am using AVRs regularly, as that's what I currently program for living. They are OK, even if I don't like them personally.

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to Andy:

if I understood correctly, one of Jason's criteria is a non-SMD package. Are there any ARMs in DIP/PLCC?