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Even if they stopped making AVRs together, there are plenty of other (arguably better) MCUs on the market anyway.

At the company I work for, we've replaced all the Atmega chips in our products with the STM32F0 series chips for lower-end requirements and with STM32F4 series for higher end stuff, because they have more grunt and generally have more peripherals, and are similar prices.

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How many MCUs have the same strong, libre toolchain?

Free GCC tool chains are present for the TI MSP430, TI Tiva Series C (Cortex M4) and also TI Hercules (Cortex M3) series. Apart from that I have tried STM32F4 series with GCC tool chains.

I have personally developed Bluetooth stack using the GCC tools for the MSP430 using the CC246x Bluetooth modules and it was a blast.

So you have a lot of options with free tool chains. I personally use only free toolchains on linux. It is the best development setup and you have a lot of options for debugging and tool development.

Are there any which are easily used breadboard style project?

NXP's (and now Freescale's) LPC1100 are ARM Cortex M0 processors available in DIP packages. IIRC, NXP is the only one making DIP ARMs, but breakout boards exist....

There are indeed a bunch of them. Here's the ones STM provides: http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532

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