You are kidding right? namecoin also needs to be renewed, and currently it's several times more expensive than just registering a ICANN domain with godaddy.
Also the cheapest price in the world would do nothing, if the whole world don't support the protocol.
The problem is how do you convince the whole world to go against ICANN regulation and support .bit namecoin? My guess is it's almost impossible. So namecoin will remain an obscure experiment similar to OpenNIC
If the owning vs leasing argument doesn't convince people then the very low price of registration and renewal might.