ASIC's are just going to speed up the process of centralizing the money, and making the poor poorer and the rich richer to an even greater extent than things are already.
I agree with this. Technology speeds everything up, even the stages of greed and elitism. Bitcoin has very much gone from a moral ground of "any schmuck can earn!" to "You need a week's salary of an investment to earn." to "Only those with the ability to take a large financial risk can earn"
That said, morality goes out the window when there is money involved. It will be interesting to see if there is a morality shift to alternate currencies and equally interesting to try to determine if it's a morality shift or a financial shift. There is a lot of money invested in hardware which WILL work with those alternate currencies. For the past couple of days, PPCOIN is running around 175% more profitable to mine than BTC so perhaps it has already begun.
I don't see the step towards ASICs as being morally questionable, myself. It's still "any schmuck can earn" in my book when there's $150 ASICs available.
$150? Who has $150 ASICs? You must mean in some not-so-distant future.
I don't believe that a $150 ASIC device would be worth plugging in.
Assuming we're in that future and the difficulty has risen... and assuming you don't have free electricity....
If the current $600 FPGA devices are $150, would they be worth plugging in?
There is no $150 GPU device which is worth plugging in now, never mind the future.
There is no $150 CPU which is worth plugging in.