I'm not really qualified to say, but isn't modern ARM also quite horrific from osdev point of view. At least x86 has some sort of standards imposed by intel, but with ARM every manufacturer is doing it's own thing with the peripheral functions. Wasn't that what Linus was complaining some time back that Linux ARM support files are blowing up because there is too little code shared between platforms?
That's only an issue if you're building a general purpose OS that tries to target every ARM board out there. If you're just making a hobby OS on a simple device, then you don't really need to worry about it. In the x86 world it would be analogous to saying that you don't need to worry about writing an ACPI engine into your hobby OS.
