The point is that its a free market (god, I hate that word, sounds so libertarian!), and there's no reason why bitcoin should be the only choice. ... People choose between debit and credit, paper or plastic, visa Amex Mastercard, choose among different banks and gas stations (whose final product is indistinguishable from that of their competitors). Contrary to your statement, there is in fact a contingent of people who use macs. There's also many people who use iOS and many more who opt for android, while others opt for blackberry. RHEL, Centos or Ubuntu? Postgres, MySQL, mariadb, oracle, SQL server or FileMaker?
There will of course be alternative cryptocurrencies. There are no laws or rules against them, and obviously everyone is free to use them. My main point is that Bitcoin is not dying, nor is it anywhere at risk of being replaced by something like Litecoin. Not unless something so radically different comes along that Bitcoin ca't implement it even with a hard fork. And sure, people use all those other OS's, but that still does't change the fact that Windows is the dominant OS out there.
So the point is, nowhere do you see a "this is good enough for everyone" approach, yet a lot of people think that bitcoin, with its 3 year history, ought to be it for peer to peer currencies.
I don't know what other people think. The reason I personally think that bitcoin is it, is simply because it's a protocol, not a piece of software that gets upgraded or not. If something like Litecoin's 2.5 minute block confirmation time turns out to be a significant advantage, Bitcoin can easily switch to such a confirmation with a fork. If, or rather when, SHA-265 hashing algorithm becomes inadequate, Bitcoin will switch to something better, like Scrypt, or something that is resistant to quantum computers. Bitcoin can even run two different mining algorithms at the same time if need be, giving time for miners to switch from old to new mining hardware. There is just nothing that I can think of, short of debt-based Ripple system, that Bitcoin can't implement if users see a need for it.
The time to first confirmation is a huge one I think.
I actually think confirmation times may be too short in the long run. There are discussions elsewhere on this forum about the speed-of-light problem for using Bitcoin between Earth and Mars. As for buying things like coffee, there are lots of ways to use bicoin where you don't need to worry about confirmations. One of those methods will be released either in 0.9, or the version after.
The artificial cap on number of coins to be issued is another (I see zero advantage to this over a perpetually expanding monetary base).
This has been discussed at length, and the basic problem is, how do you control the increase? If you give that control to a party of people, you've basically defeated one of the biggest reasons for Bitcoin. If you base it on some algorithm, there will always be ways to game them. If you just set it to a constant 3% a year increase, not only will you have trouble convincing people to move their money into something that gives them a negative return (see Freicoin), but the world's economy doesn't grow at a constant 3%, so you'll still have boom and bust cycles with periods of inflation/deflation.
More simply, and I say this as a complete hypocrite, having mined coins, sold them and bought from BFL while seeing dollar signs in my eyes, I think that the incentives in Bitcoin are completely upside down; people concentrate on mining as their road to riches rather than concieving businesses, and people hold coins close to their chest on hoping to simply profit from the fact that they hold those coins....
I'll name some of the richest Bitcoin people who are running bitcoin businesses:
Eric Voorhees (Satoshidice, Coinapult), Charlie Shrem (Bitinstant), Roger Ver (Bitcoinstore.com, and many others), Tony Gallippi (BitPay), Jered Kenna (Tradehill), Mark Karpeles (MtGox).
Now can you name some of the richest people who are bitcoin miners?
Sure, people started out thinking of Bitcoin as a get-rich-quick scheme, where you just run your GPU and print money. I was one of them. But bitcoin mostly makes people rich when they actually do some business with it. And Satoshi's brilliant idea was also that those who mined and hoarded at the start, found themselves wealthy once Bitcoin was more widely accepted, and are now pumping that wealth into developing more bitcoin tools. If you had been at the Bitcoin 2013 conference, you would've seen that of al the energy and enthusiasm there, barely any of it was about mining (BFL had a table, and Yifu made a presentation about Avalon), but 95% of the rest of it was all about bitcoin businesses, hardware, development, financial services, etc. The tens of thousands of dollars that were being thrown around at the conference weren't from miners.
I don't see why there are uproars when that happens, quite honestly. Worse are calls to actually attack the the competitors, and worse still are those who actually do attack currencies, simply because those currencies aren't Bitcoin.
Part of the reason there are uproars is because newbies get suckered into investing in scamcoins, or investing their money into altcoins thinking they can be "early adopters" or wealthy miners, when whatever it is they are adopting has no support behind it. Personally, I don't see Litecoin's "economy" growing beyond just the miners who feel butthurt about not being able to mine bitcoins anymore, and thus expect that it will eventually stagnate. There really aren't any benefits that can't be overcome on bitcoin's side. Look at this list:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrenciesand think about how many fools were parted with their money.
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