All true. In my case I had to take a huge pay cut just so I was able to get into the industry. I'm not sure if this is the correct way (or the only way) to get in from a web development background. It is just what I did.

There are fewer companies that do embedded systems, but there are also not that many developers. Headhunters call me a few times a month just to ask if I'm willing to change my job, since experienced real-time embedded systems engineers are so rare that they have to actually steal one from somewhere else.

Really, really, depends on your situation.