It doesn't necessarily need new features (a la namecoin) to be meaningful. This is part of the coolness of open source, if you think something else will work better you're free to modify and distribute those changes. In this case we have someone who's decided that a brief introductory period of crazy steep inflation would be better since we get to the much-touted deflationary part of the curve sooner. I've considered creating the opposite: a variant where inflation occurred so slowly and over such a long span of time that it would be highly unlikely for the increase in supply to ever outpace the increase in demand. Someone who believes inflation is the way to go might create a fork in which nSubsidy never halves and there is no enforced ceiling on the number of coins.

Just because it wasn't a massive feature-packed fork doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. If you don't think a steep but brief inflationary period would be a beneficial change, then don't use ixcoin. If you think bitcon's curve has the wrong shape, duration, etc. then it's an easy matter to change a few key numbers and reshape the graph to your design. Saying this fork is worthless, profiteering, gluttonous, etc because the changes made aren't substantial enough is like arguing that bitcoin wasn't a substantial change because it's deflationary. Sometimes changing a single thing is a big deal.

Also, assuming any of the bounties on the wiki site are real and will actually be paid, it seems to add up that the original 580k that were mined before release are being used as rewards to help move ixcoin's infrastructure forward. Since ixcoin and bitcoin use identical RPC, any products developed for one should work for the other with little to no modification. If an ixcoin bounty leads to the development of something that can be useful to bitcoin then it has helped the bitcoin cause (and vice versa).

No one is stealing anything from anyone. Not any more than beertokens, weeds or any of the other miscellaneous feature-identical branches of bitcoin have anyway.

Edit: Oh, and since such forks tend to be lower difficulty (even lower than namecoin usually) they also make mining more accessible. BTC and NMC both have difficulties so high that CPU mining is more than unprofitable, it's flat out impossible. Let the casuals mine the forks and those of us with dedicated rigs will still mine BTC. There's nothing wrong with forks, we just need a good exchange to support them all.