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Oh and feel free to discuss below...

Once BFL starts shipping or those large orders of Avalon chips get assembled, difficulty will rise enough so that GPU's will no longer be profitable above average electricity.  That point is NOT now for anyone who already has GPU's and regularly priced electricity.  I do not expect the price of BTC to keep rise with difficulty so I once difficulty goes up by 4x, GPU's are out for most users. 

I say three months. 

Let's talk about how long before ASIC mining is obsolete.

Mining is already an elitist sport.  :'(
Bitcoin mining at least...

at the current price, once difficulty hits 50mil 

How long until D-wave (http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dw_homepage.html) mining is obsolete?

Such rudimentary quantum technology.

You can use your gpus for scrypt-based coins mining.

As I posted in another thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=208630.msg2191211#msg2191211), GPU mining is still very profitable with paid-off hardware.

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With an existing 5850 GPU and summer air conditioning, it is costing me ~$0.80/day to mine (total rig wattage). (~$5.60/week)

At the current difficulty, I earn ~0.09333BTC/week which is currently ~$12/week.

That makes for a profit margin of ~100+% and is significantly cheaper than purchasing BTC directly with that ~$5.60/week.

At the current difficulty, it would be profitable for me to mine even with the price all the way down at $61/BTC.

very true im mining at 1.9 gigs and i made over $300 after power costs and that's assuming btc price doesn't go up which it will.

I did some calculation about using outdated HD 5850 for mining. If I put 6 of these ($120 each) in a rig, then the hardware breakeven time is 171 days in today's BTC price. The electricity price is $0.20/kWH. The difficulty level will rise, so might be the BTC price.

$0.20/kWH - that's high! I pay around $0.0651 so my zero-returns point is at about 100.000.000 difficulty (+/- 10.000.000, depending on BTC price) After that I may mine for heating during the winter 2013/2014.

but there are more than only BTC.
maybe use GPU for alternative currencies?

I don't think that it will be profitable once the majority of GPU owners do it, trying to squeeze the last juice from their cards. The switch-over to (mainly) LTC will happen fast and the difficulty will sky-rocket. As more miners have LTC for sale, converting to BTC, LTC price will go further down. No, I have a gloomy outlook on alt-coin GPU mining after ASICs. Time will tell.

Disclaimer: I still CPU-mine LTC @ 150kh/s spread over 4 CPUs, with a top-tier i7 standing for 82kh/s :)

When BTC GPU miners migrate to LTC, the LTC difficulty will rise. For example, at present LTC hash power is about 20GH/s. If the GPU hash of 40T in BTC change to 40GH/s of LTC, then the LTC difficulty will triple. But after that, the increase will be slow due to slow increase of new GPU. That is different from BTC dramatic difficulty rise due to flood of ASIC.

I reckon the end of year LTC will be less than 5 times of present value, which will be 3,000.

As I said in another post 60K+ avalon asic chips will hit the pools by the end of the year if not before :/

I was about to make a 4 gpu rig... i won't bother :/

To respond to my own post; Sure the next best thing will come along eventually but the theory of better mining technology is one thing... To carry it out in the real world and have it become easily and widely available to everyone is another thing entirely. There is no better example than BFL. How long has it been since they announced their start? and can you I or anyone go purchase a unit today? Hell no. Well we can, but we might get a better return by flushing our money down the toilet and hoping a cash treee grows from it  ;)

Same with Avalon, a few batches have shipped, true. But that doesn't mean GPU's are obsolete only because you cant go buy an Alalon unit.... So to answer my question, IMO I think when the time from placing an order for an ASIC unit till it arrives at our doors is cut down to no more than 1 month wait, GPU's will still be the most relevant means of mining...

See but I think you should! Thats just entirely too many assumptions not to. Even if they do, your assuming your GPU's will then be worthless if you decide to sell and put the money into an ASIC yourself, Or that most younger kids would be able to afford ASIC units as oppose to cheaper GPU's...

Litecoin - Great for people who missed the bitcoin train!!

There are no assumptions about the avalon asic chips flooding the pools by the end of the years, check the forums and you'll see that more than 50k chips were acquired already !

Yes, there are. GPU mining profitability depends on your power cost, BTC price and the difficulty. Avalon chips are factored in there.
For me, GPU mining will be marginally profitable until the difficulty hits 110.000.000 at today's BTC price.

I think you might be mistaken... Who the heck would have shipped 50k ASIC units? The first two batches of Avalon chips only equal 900 units total!