I probably would've gone for the Motorola myself - depending on the feature set I required. Motorola has always been big in automotive - a look at their features will confirm that. Does that make 8051's crap?
I think the architecture of PIC's are crap -has that stopped people buying PICs? From a hobby perspective one normally chooses a micro and sticks with that, from a professional perspective you choose a micro that has the price and feature set the task requires - programming a PIC is much the same as a HC08,8051,AVR or a Pentium4. Certain applications can tend to favour one architecture/part over another but if I needed to flash leds I would probably use a 8051 or AVR as I am familiar with the toolsets and have suitable parts in hand.