I think it's important to understand what is going on. This is only my opinion, but feel free to correct or add anything.

IMO altcoins got popular for these reasons:

• lots of newbies with regret and (incorrect) thinking in style "I missed the boat with bitcoin, what is the next big thing"
• pumps & dumps are much easier done with altcoins and on newbies
• GPU miners lost their profits when FPGAs and ASICs arrived and had to switch to something else. They suddenly became incentivized to promote altcoins
• all cryptocurrencies are currently more than 90% speculation. The network effect, that Erik Voorhees is talking about, is only semi-valid at the moment. When Bitcoin price will reach its full potential and the system becomes more like a transactional currency, network effect will cause the value to (finally) concentrate in one currency
• hype-price feedback

I see these reasons as the "perfect storm", the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But it is also not sustainable. Newbies will learn the fundamentals, suckers from pumps & dumps will learn from their mistakes, the mining aspect will lose power (professionalization), built infrastructure will make Bitcoin more usable for day-to-day transactions.

TL;DR: don't fall for altcoins, unless you really understand the reasons for owning them