Do you know if any of these are likely to reach the heights of BitCoin anytime soon, or are we a while off that?
All these make it seem like a better alternative for micro-transactions in the end.
I'm just wondering in terms of psychology, what impact it has to write in ever decreasing denominations? Pricing something as 0.000232 BTC is much more difficult to read and understand. So, if there are more coins in circulation, this would hopefully not happen until much later. It will inevitable happen (if it is also a success). But just for adoption and ease of use in the short and medium term it will be easier to read.
As for a big impact on the value of bitcoin, I don't think so. Bitcoin has the networking effects for now, many people are working on accepting them. It may be that the additional cost of accepting, for example LTC is lower when already accepting BTC, but BTC has a large first mover advantage.
You can check out btc-e.com and see the absolutely massive price spike of litecoin. It went from .80c two weeks ago to trading at $4 consistently over the last week.