Suggest Controller

I'm building Prepaid Energymeter.
First i wanted to use readymade Analog ICs 775x series.
Now i want to build it on my own using microcontroller.
Please suggest me which controller to use?
what shud be the criteria for choosing controller?

I need to do multiplications, sub, add, divide.
keypad, EEPROM and/or SmartCard interface.

Which one is better suited, PIC or 8051 series.

Either would do fine, personally I would use a PIC, but that's because I'm used to using PIC's.

You might be interested to know that the UK magazine EPE is publishing a new electricity meter, one with two seperate monitored outputs, in the February 2005 issue - out January 13th. It uses a PIC, as did their earlier single channel version a number of years ago (but that was a 16C84).

Writing PIC code is easier than codes for 8051.