>>14
You might have noticed that the Chinese have also started churning out ARM processors for mobile devices. MIPS will be relegated to supercomputers until they decide to change their "national computer architecture" as well.
>>17
There's a whole industry writing firmware and bootloaders for other architectures as well, so that's a silly argument.
>>19
Even performance-oriented architectures like Alpha and IA64 don't have hardware division, it's not that important. And if you really want to, you can switch to Thumb-2 mode.