My friend is probably going for a 16-bit PIC running at 33 MHz
Have him take a look at the Philips XA, in my opinion that is the one of all 16bitters that make the most sense, at least to someone that "grew up with" the '51.

The instruction set reads SPEED, so while the clock frequency of 33 MHz may not seem impressive it does in one instruction what on many other processors would take 5. For instance all addressing is address AND offset (read one machine instruction to acces a member of a structure)

Erik