Excellent summary and I agree totally. I foresee some Bitcoin related startups coming online in 2013 for Asia side and once that happens, the BTC price will even hit USD 100 and beyond.
I'm a long-term bull. I started buying in 2011 and have continued to buy throughout, including this month.
Bitcoin has made great strides in the last year and a half, including:
1) More security (hashrate), and about to get 10x+ more secure due to ASIC deployment.
2) Far more professionalism in the ecosystem in general, and in 3rd party services in particular.
3) Development and understanding of best-practices with respect to how to handle bitcoin, in terms of online wallets, offline wallets, cold storage, etc.
4) Far more merchant adoption (just ask BitPay).
5) Traditional venture capital is now dipping their feet in the water.
6) More professionals and technologists from other industries are now focusing on bitcoin. Observe the
bitcoin2013 speaker/panalist list.
7) Services such as SatoshiDice show a use-case that isn't possible without bitcoin, and gambling looks set to become bitcoin's first high-volume general use-case.
8.) Bitcoin acceptance announcements from top sites including Wordpress.com, Reddit.com, and Mega
9) More startups and serious entrepreneurs investing their time, energy, and creativity into bitcoin.
10) Huge improvement in the quality of the mainstream media attention given to bitcoin.
11) Another 18 months of successfully processing transactions without any fundamental protocol failure.