Well personally I am interested in alt-coins because they are easier to mine. It's much nicer to see a half or whole coin reward instead of one to 8 decimal places...
The only question is how easy will it be for the SHA-256 ASIC chips to be converted to alt-coin mining. I suppose that depends on who developed the coin/miner and the ASIC developers
None of the coins are more profitable at the moment, though.
And for mining SHA-256 coins, you simply start cgminer, send it to the pool you want to mine in and it will start mining. Whatever tool you may be using.