Surprised at my own ignorance and the apparent lack of reaction of knowledgeable readers of this thread, I found out about PPCoin (PPC). Apparently PPC tries to solve the mining HW race problem, by not only minting by proof-of-work (which is HW minable), but also by proof-of-stake (which allows for long-term average-Joe profit). They have their own forum HERE.

I strongly recommend everyone to have a look at the following 2 papers:

1. "Synthetic Commodity Money" [George Selgin, 2013]
2. "PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake" [S.King and S.Nadal, 2012]

After having briefly read the above articles, I am more convinced of the decline of Bitcoin as described in the OP. Although, Bitcoin may very well be a great currency for the next couple of years, the number of miners will steadily go down until we are eventually left with commercial mining operators (like already mentioned) and a small hard-core group of amateurs, mining mostly out of academic interest and not-for-profit. Therefore, it seem fair to say that a crypto-currency based on a more evenly distributed minting process (e.g. as proposed by PPC) will eventually take over.

For a complete list of other crypto-currencies look HERE.