Peter: fit your application to the ICE? what do you mean? I do not fit anything to the ICE.
You may be happy fooling around with setting port bits at certain locations for debugging purposes, this may, indeed, suffice for smaller applications. I am not, I need breakpoints and source display. I do not need to show off how little I can get by with, my time is too valuable to fool around with setting checkbits and such. With upwards of 60k of "C" code written by someone else, you need the capabilities of ICE.
The other point is that if a manufacturer disregard the need for ICE, what else do they disregard?
Have fun,
Erik