PICC and PICC18 is so pupolar in the industry, all Microchip FAE here in the new england area recommend it.
Couple of years ago, Some of them even told me privately to avoid using C18 for product development since they thought Microchip C18 was a piece of junk and a trouble-maker for them.
My personal experience about the C18 is, once you got use to other C compilor, like the PICC or Turbo C, you won't like the C18.
And I don't recommend the C18 for beginners even though it is almost free.
The PICC lite is free and support some popular PICs. It will save lot of time for beginner, so they can concentrate on the C language, not the compiler itself.