One thing I want to say about LTC.  It's pretty well known that most of the big players such as KNC, Ghash, etc, are going to be building farms for Litecoin.  The LTC network is set to expand to a giant level comparable to that of Bitcoin itself.  Once the BTC and LTC networks are virtually identical in scale and investment capital, in a rational world, the price of BTC should go down and LTC go up.  The world is not rational, and BTC has a bit more forward momentum, so I expect both to go up with increasing world adoption.

Why do I think ASIC will help Litecoin?  You can look at an altcoin named "Myriadcoin" to get an example of why.  Myriadcoin was designed to be mined with five different algorithms at the same time with separate block rewards for each algorithm.  This makes it a lot harder for a mining cartel to monopolize coin emission.  It turns out Myriadcoin's biggest strength was also it's biggest weakness.  Since a mining cartel has a hard time driving up difficulty to constrain supply, there's a lot less upward pressure on price.

Right now Litecoin is doing exactly what I predicted it would do.  The price would initially dump with the initial ASIC roll out as the vendors exploit the difficulty and mine and dump, but over the next few months as the ASIC distribution becomes more even, the price will then increase as supply becomes constrained.

Why do I think altcoins are valid?  Because the financial industry wants to hedge security, and one, single block chain does not give them that.  What if Gavin or some other guy issued an update that imploded the BTC network?  They're just supposed to accept 100% loss?  No, they're not going to do that.  There will be at least 5 big coins because a 20% potential loss is a lot better than 100%.  Also, at least two coins have to exist for value of the first to transfer to the second should problems arise.