Ripple will provide immediate benefits to Bitcoin. For example, the Kraken exchange (
http://kraken.com) will make it tremendously easier to buy and sell Bitcoins, and Kraken accounts are also Ripple enabled.
Awesome, I didn't know that. Have you had a look at Open Transactions yet? It looks great. I wish I had stumbled upon all this a couple of years ago, but to be honest I only got interested after I kept coming across newspaper articles talking about Bitcoin crossing the $1B market cap value...