I personally consider IPO based issuance to be fairer, because mining is a specialized field, while today everybody can have easy access to BTC (depending on their capital of course).
Anyone with a CPU could have mined PTS at the start. Unless somebody is checking bitcointalk on PIII.
I agree with most of the points, but asking for BTC at the start to distribute coins is basically asking money for some promises. Even now there are 2 threads asking for BTC to distribute new coins. At least with mining you can get and keep some and follow it to see how it goes. And yes, I am probably biased (its hard to keep an even viewpoint).