It sounds like 8 years ago when "most managers" and "reasonably qualified" programmers would get laughed at for suggesting ruby or python for a serious production project.
Atmel and most other micro suppliers are now coming out with their own "frameworks" these days, which are similar to Arduino in providing libraries for common tasks with a similar level of abstraction to Arduino, without the loss of the higher level functionality like debugging. These are a lot more attractive to EEs than Arduino is.
It will be interesting to see how this changes over the next 5 or so years. By then most of the young engineers who grew up with Arduino or were even introduced to electronics with Arduino will have graduated University and will be working in the industry. It will be interesting to see the effects that this generation of new engineers have.
TI started one for its MSP430's called Grace this summer, but it's very very primitive thus far.
Atmel also has one called FLIP for its USB-enabled MCU's to make them act as various USB profiles/devices.
Nearly all the chip manufacturers I know of have some sort of framework/library for their Cortex M3 line (which is what is in the new Arduino).