I'm a newb as well, but I have thought something along similar lines before.  A small, steady amount of inflation as you suggest seems like a good thing.  From my understanding, I think only deflation or inflation are possibilities; it's either one or the other.  I'm not sure about that, but since coins will inevitably be lost, and more and more people use Bitcoin, right now it's set up to be deflationary, and the only other way to counteract that is to make it inflationary in some way.  I suppose that you could try to make it result in 0% inflation, but that would be difficult.

I suppose another way to do it would be to have the limit of Bitcoins indexed to population somehow.  That is, assuming all the world was using only one currency and population was increasing, then with a fixed limit it would be deflationary, since more and more people would be using it as more and more people participated in the economy.  0% inflation could theoretically be achieved by adding the same number of Bitcoins (somehow) for every person participating in the economy.  I'm just talking off the top of my head here, though.

As for the possibilities of other currencies supplementing Bitcoin, that's certainly a possible solution, but for the sake of convenience (which is huge in terms of getting everyday people to adopt it), I think having Bitcoin be slightly inflationary is a better solution.

creativex makes a good point, too; I highly doubt Bitcoin will be changed, but if there is or will be a better model, hopefully it would be adopted as a replacement.