Ultimately I think there's room for multiple cryptos to serve a solid role in commerce and trade in the future. Litecoin has the advantage of faster transaction confirms, the PPCoin proof of stake is interesting, but it doesn't take away from the strength of the Bitcoin network due to being the original cryptocurrency. A lot of alts are junk, but there are some interesting feature sets out there.
If anything though, the growing inability for the average person to acquire bitcoins easily is a good thing for its legitimacy as a currency. Currency should be difficult to acquire or else it looses value. If someone magically found a way to mine gold with a CPU tomorrow, the price would plummet.
As long as it doesn't become centralized, I see no reason that requiring a large upfront cost to mine bitcoin is a problem. Who knows, maybe Intel will start throwing in a few dozen GH worth of Bitcoin ASIC into a future 14nm process CPU design. Would be almost trivial for them to do and would give their customers a little bit of "free" income while further increasing the security of the network.
i think the world has to accept bitcoin first if any altcoin is going to succeed.
and i doubt there will be a major need for a altcoin when ppl are starting to accept bitcoin.
but thats just my 2 cents.
