I believe there are opportunities for additional crypto-based currencies to take hold and present staying power within the market. That said, I'd wager the likeliness of this to be rooted in the fundamental strength and appeal of some meaningful difference between it and BitCoin. There have been several small nuanced derivatives that have considerable following and community support, but the vast majority are simple contrived garbage. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of c++ can grab the QT wallet source, run a find/replace on the coin's name, edit the images and replace them with their own, and tweak the block reward and halving rate. These will continue to proliferate until the attention bubble bursts. Those with a marketable difference in design or application will remain. Of course no one knows when that will be.
Good spoken, whitejade! That's why I bet on NXT, it has it's own code base and a lot of new features...