Any experience with TI's RF ICs?

I'm looking for anyone that might have experience with Texas Instrument's IC rf transmitters/receivers/transceivers. I've got an idea with an eye on production, and TI's CC1150 has more features and capabilities than I'm even close to needing, but at $1.10/unit in quantity its the cheapest I've found.

The problem is that they don't seem to have a dev kit for this particular chip. Even if they come out with one, I probably won't be prepared to pay the $500 dollars they are asking for some of the others.

It seems that the only way there is to program these things is to set it up through the SPI interface and use an MCU to address the transmitter and then send the byte to program the target register after the MCU properly addresses it, clocking all the bits in like you would clock data to an LCD display. This seems pretty cumbersome and prone to a lot of mistakes on my end. I'm not really familiar with all of TI's product development tools, so I'm wondering if anyone knows of anything like MicroChip's PicKit software and hardware.

Any general opinions on TI's rf IC's?

Thanks in advance.