Tell me if I am wrong:

So far, the only people this coin can well benefit in the near future are the miners. In all other respects (especially as a payment method), is there any way to win the race against BTC and LTC or even gain market shares from them?
Now your counter argument might be: why should we win a race? We can build our own market.
To be honest, do you really think this works? Merchants will accept what is widely adopted. This is BTC. People will accept what is widely adopted. This is BTC. Let's call miners another group in this game. As soon as ASICS conquer the whole market, they will turn to mining VTC. What is happening now?
By thinking through this process, it becomes clear that this must be a reaaaal long term investment (long term in the cryptocurrency world).
You cannot really open successful parallel markets with another cryptocurrency, can you? What is required to put VTC in a really successful position is quite a lot of transition of the whole BTC market to let's say VTC.
Hard to imagine. It will take time to enter the really important industries like retailing and so on. They just got comfortable with BTC and now you enter the door and tell them that there is a better alternative... Wow. So, I think we are very much dependent on the mining advantage. And this will probably take quite some time to convince they many people it needs to make this coin really take off. Wrong?
I hope we get that zerocoin feature implemented as fast as possible.