Dude i'm really having trouble understanding what in tar-nation you mean by this. Are you suggesting that the dev team runs the bitcoin network bc, even though the client is open source, they have written it in a way that makes the spec amorphous, thus forcing every one to keep relying on them? Solidifying Gavin & co's benevolent dictatorship?
Try to forget for a moment everything that you know about software engineering and think about yourself as a brand manager of a consumer product.
From now on the discussion isn't going to be about technical facts, it is going to be about the perception of facts amongs the non-technical people.
Do you think it possible to reverse engineer the recipe to the Kentucky Fried Chicken to such an accuracy that nobody will be able to distinguish it in a blind tasting? I think yes, but people will insist on sighted tasting and will claim that they are capable of distinguishing the true KFC from your Clone Fried Chicken.
If you don't like popular American consumer products then how about French wines? Why for example Veuve Clicquot is considered more valuable than many other "Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, Méthode Champenoise" beverages? How did they achieved that value and how they maintained it? Do you think that it is impossible to produce a Californian sparkling wine that 99.9% drinkers will not be able to distinguish in a blind tasting from the original? I think that this will be relatively easy, but the clone wine will have much lower market price because everyone buys wine while looking at the labels, not by the taste.
For a non-engineer it is very easy to distinguish between say Bitcoin and Litecoin. For now everyone knows that the first Appelation d'Satoshi Controlee and the second is sovetskoye shampanskoye.
What if the market gets flooded with Bitcoin clones, e.g. Bitcoin over port 8888 (marketed to Chinese, with some Confucius' proverb in its block 0), etc. And every one of those clones will be able to show that they are produced exactly according to the original Satoshi method. Or they will be able to easily show how they improved the original recipe.
Bitcoin currently has a lot of very valuable brand equity, simply because it was first in its niche. The situation may however easily change once experienced brand managers decide to enter this niche with their clone products. Currently all the clones are marketed in a completely amateurish way. Or even much worse than amateurish, like the self-destructive marketing of SolidCoin.