How can a coin with a one minute blocktime achieve "10 second transactions" regularly enough to warrant using it as a headline feature?
Sure, you might hit the odd 10 second time for first confirmation (you could be lucky and hit 1 second) but you could just as easily get 50 seconds or 59 seconds.
And how much did you pay the editor of this article to let this and other ropey claims/opinions through as news?

Would/did coindesk have published this article?
Its pretty much instant in my experience and its fully confirmed in like 5 minutes ? Maybe someone can make a website to test transaction times for various coins.
Unless I see anything better I would guess BC for best chance of a rise in 2014 unless we are very surprised by the new asic scrypt and it greatly benefits litecoin and similar and raises their prices like happened last year with bitcoin. I think that was publicity not asic but perhaps the two were not coincidental and asic is key to higher prices on coins, I guess we'll see