OOPIC, much like BASIC Stamp, is a marketing gimmick and actually a pointless and poor piece of hardware. In fact C can and does produce encapsulated structures virtually identical to those in "OOPIC". OOPIC is not actually Object Oriented at all, they're making their own interpretation of the term and it's unfortunate that this gets taught in a class. They isolate people from the microcontroller itself (completely unnecessary) and try to tell people that writing in assembly or C is difficult (which it isn't).
Not that any first microcontroller project isn't neato. I just strongly dislike these companies for passing off misinformation.
PIC comes with hardware capable of I2C, serial comm, SPI, and for newer lines, CANBus and USB. All very useful. Much of this can be bit-banged in code if there is no hardware module onboard to do it.