Couple of things:
First, I want to squash the "Satoshi mined a bunch of bitcoins on his own before releasing the bitcoin chain" idea. He publicly announced bitcoin version 0.1 six days after he generated the genesis block: January 9, 2009:
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10142.html
According to the block chain history, he generated about 10 blocks total before the announcement. And we know that he didn't pre-generate blocks because the genesis block contains a quote from the January 3rd Financial Times newspaper.
Second, I have no problem with alternative block chains, I just don't personally like how this particular alternative block chain is being promoted and developed and introduced. In particular, I think it is unfair to keep hundreds of thousands of whatever-coins for yourself, and it is unwise to think that a bitcoin variation that is "almost exactly like bitcoin, only different because... well, just because" will ever have anything more than speculative value.