I used to think this sort of thing gave altcoins a big advantage. But I think the improvement from a 10 minute block time to 2.5 or 1 minutes/block is fairly minor in terms of the proportion of financial transactions where that matters.

For example, for online purchases that will be shipped to your door, saving 9 minutes is probably not going to result in a package arriving any sooner. Likewise it doesn't matter much for investing or real estate or other major purchases.

And on the other hand, 1 minute blocks are still painfully slow if you are standing at the counter of a fast food restaurant that only accepts crypto after "X" confirmations. For in-person purchases we are simply going to have to forget about the X-confirmation approach and go with the kind of network-propagation techniques that Bitstamp and I think others are using for near-instant transaction confirmations. In which case the altcoins also have no advantage.

So, in theory there may be a small benefit, but in practice I doubt it will (by itself) be a game-changer. At least not for a long while.