So there's Nxt, MasterCoin, BitShares (or is it ProtoShares?), eMunie, Open Transactions, all of which are supposedly going to be launched/released soon (any others?). It is very easy to market vaporware - just claim that your product has feature X, and it does. Since its just vaporware it can have all the best features before it even exists.

Ripple, on the other hand, actually exists and already has one major gateway (kraken next in line) and two chinese gateways (with rising CNY capitalization btw, up from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY on Nov 12th to 787k CNY today).

The competition hasn't even left the starting line.