Besides the very small amount of businesses that accept Litecoin, all of the alt-coins are useless.  The are used for only ONE thing, and that is to speculate to TRADE FOR BITCOINS! 

Ok so yeah, miners are flocking to altcoins.  Do you REALLY think there is a problem with the hash rate on the bitcoin network at this point?? Have you actually looked at how fast the hash rate is going UP?  Asic's are taking over and the gpu miners are looking for alternatives to "get more bitcoins".  Take a look, http://coinchoose.com/  Should I mine bitcoins or feathercoins right now?  Anyone with half a brain would mine feathercoins because i get 2.4 times the amount of bitcoins after trading them(at the time of this post). 

The altcoins to most people are just a get "bitcoin" rich quicker scheme. 

Altcoins is the last thing you can blame for anything negative happening to Bitcoins.