Bitcoin may not be the best, and it's only advantage may be that it was first, but in reality that is a HUGE, HUUUUGGEEE advantage. Probably the biggest advantage you can have. To be more clear, it's actually not the fact that it came first that gives it an advantage, but rather the fact that it currently is the most popular by far (because it gained popularity before others did). This is why Facebook is so much more popular than Google+. It is why YouTube is more popular than Vimeo. The thing that becomes more popular first tends to stay the most popular by far. These trends can even be (and often are) mathematically modeled using graphs of social networks.

Consider a graph with nodes and edges, where each node represents a cryptocurrency user and each edge represents a transaction between two users. Connected nodes want to be using the same cryptocurrency, otherwise they can't trade with each other. Each node has a rule that it will adopt the cryptocurrency that is used by more than a certain percent (let's say 50%) of its connected nodes. You can see how if the majority of the nodes use bitcoin, the phenomenon will spread and almost everybody will use it. In order to change that and have everybody use, say Litecoin, you need to have enough people adopt Litecoin such that the majority of every node's neighboring nodes adopted litecoin. It is difficult to explain this without drawing it, but hopefully you get my main point: inertia is powerful, and bitcoin still has a TON of it.