On the other hand, without the other coins out there right now, your chances on earning anything is next to nill unless you got a great computer. How many people you know are running multiple GPUs in a basic home computer? Hell, you cant get much with a 7750 or a 450 mining BTC or LTC... maybe after a few weeks you can get something together... but in reality the attention span of most people is very short and unless they start seeing results rather quickly they will just lose interest and move on.
WIth just one 5870 you can snap up a nice bunch of GRouPcoin, I0Coin, CoiLedCoin, and GeistGeld all at once, while paying the electricity and slowly paying for the hardware, using p2pool so you get fractions of bitcoins to pay the electricity and eventually hardware while merged-mining just these easiest four of the merged-mined coins since the chance of happening upon a block of namecoin, ixcoin or devcoin is admittedly a crapshoot.
Groupcoin difficulty is actually up in the hundreds now so even skip them if you like, the rest though are really really easy.
Plus, whether or not you have any GPU at all, you can also rake in CPU coins all day long with just a CPU. (Tenebrix and Fairbrix...)
(Not long ago you could rake in BBQcoin with your CPU too, but maybe you missed that boat. Don't miss out on Tenebrix and Fairbrix too!)
-MarkM-