A faster first confirmation is an enormous benefit if we want alternative currencies to be used in brick and mortar stores and restaurants. You can't have each person in line waiting 10 minutes or more.
Not really. Brick and mortar stores do most of their volume using 0-conf credit and debit card payments that take weeks or months to become irreversible.
Handling that situation is called "risk management", and there's a lot more to it than people who are hung up on block creation time realize.
There is effectively
no difference at all between a 2 minute block time and a 10 minute block time for a brick and mortar merchant. Both of those times represent an unacceptable delay at the cash register so no POS cryptcoin payment system is going to wait for blockchain confirmations. They'll operate on a zero conf basis, using systems that make the risk of reversal predictable and therefore something they can accurately price.
+1
I still think Bitcoin would benefit from moving to a 1 minute block time. Some of the benefit would be in getting a confirmation sooner in those cases when a single confirmation is all you need, and the rest is in the advantage it would give to Bitcoin's marketing message over copycats.
Regardless, it's not a big deal, and 10 minute block times have no disadvantage (and even some advantages) for the vast majority of use-cases.
There are many alternative virtual currencies to bitcoin, such as litecoin, novacoin, etc., that have significant advantages to bitcoin,
There are no Bitcoin forks that offer significant advantages over Bitcoin. The innovation seen in the BTC-alt field has been quite minimal. Shortening the block time is in no way a "significant advantage", and Scrypt is arguably a disadvantage (can cause overheating in laptops).
What Bitcoin has is a significant advantage over every fork. A cryptocurrency network is more than just a protocol. It's also the size of the network and the amount of supporting businesses and services, and in this area, Bitcoin stands far above the imitators, making any interest in other networks based purely on speculation rather than a real world advantage.
This is very much unlike Bitcoin and fiat, where there are actual use-cases where Bitcoin is superior to fiat, despite the latter's much larger supporting economy.