I use CoinBase and it's worked well for me - you just have to wait 5 days for your transactions for the first month.

Alt coins likely will not have any long-term value unless they bring something new to the marketplace that BitCoin does not.  Since no currency has any value unless people implicitly agree for it to have value, a new alt currency would need sufficient buy in from a lot of parties before it could retain any semblance of long term value.  If a new alt currency can provide something that BitCoin cannot, it has a chance of mass adoption, but until that happens, they are not worth considering.

Thank you for this, I was wondering why I couldn't send PMs.