I think had Ripple not kept an insane amount of XRP for themselves and had found a way to fairly distribute XRP like bitcoin mining does then I would say Ripple does everything Bitcoin does and more.
But Because of this I won't ever rely on XRP to store wealth, at least not for 10-20 years until they are evenly disbursed and opencoin have spent most of their stash.
So bitcoin is still the winner in that sense. And given it only costs like $1 or less in XRP to start benefitting from the Ripple system right now, why not embrace both. You don't need to care about XRP to start using Ripple.
Bitcoin mining is the problem with Bitcoin.