I've been into it pretty heavily for the last 7-10 days. I was thinking and working on getting a GSUS pool together, but those ASIC machines are going to put any GPU COTS machines to waste, and really not worth the effort.

Litecoin does look like a good alternative since they rely more on CPUs and RAM more so than the sha256 hashes with BTC. Most people, [esp if you're running Linux] have machines CPUs that are underutilized, and [I believe] worth looking into.