Seeing as so far I'm 100% correct, here's another lovely prediction from yours truely.

~1 month after we hit the $10 mark, the big mining ops are going to scale back, sell hardware, recoup costs. If they already paid off their hardware or are in the green then they are still going to be happy bunnies making a profit.

As they leave and the difficulty lowers, it will be more attractive to mine again. I say attractive, but I don't mean that as in to make a profit, I mean that you will be able to get a lot of coins again, they just wont be worth much.

I give it 6 months till something that's copied the Bitcoin concept and improved upon it comes along. Almost everybody left will jump ship to that. The marketplace forum will flood with people wanting to buy the new currency for BTC. The whole process then starts again with the new currency, though hopefully the improvements will make it more of a success story.

Hi : please research market rates before thread crapping.  Goto ebay and do a search on completed auctions for 6990's.  They've been selling for upwards of $1300.  A huge benefit of the 6990 is simply condensing mining gear.  I have 8 5830's running, but have to have them spread across 2 mobo's and then 1 in a stand alone system. 

I still enjoy my 5830's, as my 4x5830 system was maybe $700 total and gets 1GH without oc'ing the cards to their max.