Absolute utter nonsense. The 8051 variants from Atmel have a whole array of useful peripherals including but not limited to
PCA - Programmable Counter Array, which can do output compare, input capture and PWM.
CAN - Controller Area Network for higly reliable networking.
SPI - for peripheral expansion in display controllers, and D/A converters
A/D - 8 channels 10-bit on board A/D conversion
Non-volitile data memory
64K internal code space for those applications that just won't fit the PIC mold.
I could go on, but that should be enough to combat the ignorant pronouncements.