This will crush the 90-99% of us who are GPU-mining and not interested in investing big $ on what has become an increasingly risky venture. I figured I'd be able to mine until 1Q2015, but now it looks like I'll be dropping out by mid-summer. By fall Scrypt mining will be concentrated in a small number of commercialized mining operations (or a few deep-pocketed individuals).
I wonder how that will impact the flood of altcoins? With fewer miners it will be harder for pointless altcoins to get any hashrate to speak of, which is a good thing. So fewer miners may result in a rallying around the more reasonable altcoins with the rest permanently dropping into the abyss.
I agree that this will have a centralizing effect on mining, but at the same time, I think this opens the door for some of the new generation of cryptocurrencies that are fervently being worked on. I think this is the catalyst that drives crypto-currencies into a new paradigm.
I agree that this will provide progress to scrypt coins overall, but it kind of forces the smaller miners out...which I don't like.