That's got to be just about the only one of the Ti chips I've not played with. I had a close relation with Ti, and used most of their DSP chips when real horsepower was needed in a design, preferring them to ADI and other possibilities. Keith Larson and I helped promote the "DSK" series of inexpensive DSP starter kits -- normally to use a Ti part you'd have to pay in the region of $10k for the toolchain (which we both thought was very shortsighted and stupid), so this line came with at least a free assembler/linker.
I touted the PIC line to them all the time (Microchip was a second source for the tms320c10 already) -- Ti at the time didn't have anything close to a system on chip, and as far as I know, they never "got it". What they did do was pick up the msp-430 in a buy of the company that developed it, and have since promoted it heavily. The thing was designed for and got a lot of traction in, smart power meters, and was a success. Keith was really hung up on that printer port interface, which became harder and harder to make work as windows "security" advanced, he was a pure old school dos guy. At the time, his focus was mainly on using Ti's bigger stuff as coprocessors to the then-slow intel PC's, and that was the cheapest way to get some comm bandwidth with it -- particularly as most Ti chips lacked the ability to do serial at all...they were computers, not microcontrollers. Back in the day, there wasn't flash or even eeprom in most Ti chips, it was early days. So a minimal working system still had a ton of extra parts compared to a PIC that only needed an RC at most, and you had a machine. Now you don't even need that, just a power supply.
And nowadays,
note my log board, that puts more functionality in every area into the footprint of a 40 pin dip for less money...The pics have nanowatt power standby modes also, it's a big deal with them. The one mistake I made on that design was not using a pic pin to power the 232 chip, else that board would go to microamp and below standby levels. What is interesting is that while that chip was fairly expensive ($10) at the time, it's now cheaper, but also newer PICS with more "stuff" will go right on that same PCB layout and fly, no redesign needed, just better capabilities. The smaller you are, the more that NRE hurts.
Once my business relationship with Ti was over (my customers left the company), I didn't get free tools anymore, and in my mind, there was no particular reason to pay extra to use this particular chip, since I was doing so well designing pics into products for other customers. Keith has left Ti, as has Brian Smith, to run a company Brian and I started, C&S audio that designs and sells audio test equipment and speaker drivers -- from the magnetics up.
One issue I've had with Ti (not just them), which is unlikely to manifest with this chip, is that they have no where near the backwards customer loyalty of other companies. In other words, if a line becomes unprofitable, or just not profitable enough, they'll quit making the part in a heartbeat, and strand anyone who designed it into product with no place to go except a full redesign -- they seem to assign packages and pinouts with a random number generator. Since this chip is popular, they probably wont' do that. Microchip still supplies parts back almost to their beginning, and/or parts that have the same pinouts and are compatible at the re-compile level...that's a big deal for some of my old customers, who got stuck in designs where you couldn't get the same CPU anymore and had to pay me to create designs that had longer lifetimes for parts availability.
That said, the msp 430 is probably a pretty good chip, I dimly recall looking at the architecture at their prompting and finding it decent, but for what I was doing, still not the right thing.
It's just that nothing I've yet seen is a close match for the very good built in peripherals in the PIC series, and requires a lot more parts to get to the same place functionally. I don't think the PICS are perfect or anything, just very good, and we've used them to replace scads of more expensive and complex designs at huge savings for medium-high volume manufacturers.
Microchip has also been a customer of my consulting outfit, we helped them with the DSPic in some small ways, though I myself have never used one. I tend to stick to the smaller stuff as logic replacement and controllers. For DSP kinds of things, Ti's tms320c30 line is my favorite, but is only still available because of a military contract -- it's used in smart missiles. We used it to do the only "other" credible voice over IP design other than the one TI-Telogy was pushing at the start of that. They wanted so much money (and ongoing contracts) to use their two CPU design that our telecom customer preferred to pay us to do it from scratch on one CPU. Then and now, no one believed that one could do that -- a TCP-IP stack and real digital signal processing in one chip. The 'C30 did it with plenty to spare, and some features that are still advanced over most of the existing designs, like handling out of order packets and lost packets very gracefully.
Our design never did that annoying ssst-zzt-sssst-zzzzzsssttt crap when data wasn't available (like you hear on the radio when a downlink fails), for example. As far as I know, the design is still in use for inhouse IP telephony and background music and paging distribution. It had the nice feature of using UDP for data but the more reliable TCP for call setup and teardown, which SIP and some other standards don't -- in other words, it never dropped calls. Compare that to a "modern" cell phone.
So I use Ti when I need the big stuff, it's a dream to program in any language, but just never quite got into the msp-430 (which strictly speaking, isn't a Ti thing).
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.