What do you think altcoins are?
99% of all altcoins ARE disputed forks of bitcoin.
An altcoin is THE RESULT OF someone creating a fork that only a portion of users decide to mine and use.
Nope, this doesn't work with ignorant people and some XT supporters. The last time that I used this statement, I received a nice piece of ad hominem in return. This is why theymos has called XT a programmed altcoin, I believe. It does make sense (to me).
XT is divide et impera at its finest.
XT has the potential to be an altcoin, but it also has the potential to turn the current protocol (Bitcoin Core) into an altcoin.
Right now (until someone actually mines a block that is only accepted by one of the two competing protocols) XT is nothing more than an alternate client that supports the same consensus rules as Bitcoin Core. After that, which is the alt and which is "bitcoin" will depend on the acceptance of each in the marketplace.
If I could find a feature that violated the current bitcoin consensus rules and which approximately 50% of miners, merchants, and users were willing to immediately adopt while the other 50% were adamantly against, I would roll out a node that supported the feature and suggest that we fork bitcoin today.
Perhaps the result would be a complete disaster, and we could all stop wasting our time on an experiment that clearly can stand on its own in the real world...
Or perhaps market forces would stabilize the situation and everyone would finally shut up about how horrible a contentious fork might be.
This won't be the last time that some influential people want something that some other influential people don't want. It is human nature and will occur over and over many times. We can all calm down and accept that the design of bitcoin is capable of surviving anything that anyone else might do, or we can accept that the bitcoin experiment is a failure and we can silently move on with our lives.
Either way, it is certainly ridiculous to think that either side in any "fork" is the "right side". It's also ridiculous to expect that the whole world will always do what an individual or group thinks is "best for bitcoin" just because you want the world to behave that way. There will always be differences of opinion, and there will always be people that feel that they can force their opinion on others (by threats, intimidation, mockery, scare tactics, etc).