I really need to know that too!!! I made a late entrance to the BTC world, thinking on mining and buying some BTC, but now I'm aware too of PPC, NMC, and LTC... Where I can mine efficiently with GPU or even CPU, while I get some ASIC? (supposing I will get one, someday... ).
May be BTC will get it's rising rate again, at least half of it... but with other coins on the panorama, it's more and more time consuming to take an effective strategy.