So far, bitcoin has had little competition from other crypto-currencies. This may change in the future, considering that
now it's worth a lot of money to have a successful crypto. Apple may launch one, Google may launch one, both could have cute mascots.
Bitcoin is just the first and a good one, but not perfect. And against the marketing power of Apple or Google, bitcoin would eventually lose.
Agreed.
Take intel for example. They created a FREE open rendering system called Embree. Why for free? Well because they are in the business of selling CPU's, and the more people that use rendering software, the more CPU's they sell (especially if it takes advantage of all of intels hardware optimizations).
AMD and NVIDIA have certainly not ignored the sales spike AMD has had due to mining. It would be beneficial for them to start funding development and promoting into an alt coin, even if they don't own it, because it means more sales for their hardware. And you can certainly bet they will get a bigger team behind it than exists for bitcoin, because they have the money to do so (well... AMD is questionable).