speaking of communication, I was thinking about what it would take to make a pic wirelessly communicate with, say a computer. could one simply interface the pic with a 802.11 pcmcia card? or would one have to do the signal processing themselves? I have not really looked into it yet, but it seems like the signal processing and packet verification would be done within the card.
anyway, if you have a specific thing in mind, then yeah, I would only get as many pins as you think you will need. the reason I went with a pdip40 was because I figured that 34 I/O pins could cover me no matter what I need to do.