Moreover, I suspect that speculators may not be adequately pricing the risk of a Bitcoin failure into their investment.
Fear not! If they are found wanting, they will be punished for their mistakes (in the sense that their bitcoins will be worthless)?
Hypothetically speaking, suppose Google were to announce gCash: an electronic currency very much like Bitcoin, but with builtin support in the Chrome browser and accepted as payment in all of Google's services. They could even throw in builtin support for cooperative mining in the standard client to encite people to use Chrome all the time.
Google is not going to want to get involved in the complicated legal issues surrounding bitcoin. Secondly any significant advantages for Google imply some form of centralization, negating bitcoin's fundamental benefit. Google could avoid the first issue by setting it up as an open source project online, using a mysterious anonymous persona with a funny Japanese name who neither speaks nor writes Japanese. The second is more fundamental.