I know there are a lot of naive people in the world, but ~$40 to make a client and launch a coin? I know the ONLY way I'd ask that little is if all I had to do was take the existing source code and then search and replace the names and maybe do 1 or 2 tweaks.
What do you think 90%+ of the launched coins are. EXACTLY that. Hell most of the time they don't even modify everything that needs to be modified. They use the same alertkey as LTC, they don't change magic numbers so nodes running multiple blockchains end up confused spamming LTC blocks into xCoin network for example. Hell in some coins they don't even change user facing strings so some error messages or confirmations will say "Litecoin".
To date there has been very little innovation in the alt-coin space:
LTC, PPC, Freicoin (I think it is a stupid idea but it is at least innovative),
Powercoin Primecoin. That is about it. Everything else has been copy, replace, tweak, launch.
Now I am still not sold that these coins will be successful. For example I don't think merchants really care which POW is used as long as the network is secure. However all these coins required a little more work than copy, paste, tweak, and launch.