In practice you need merchants to accept the coins for them to be very useful. So far no coin has come ahead although there has been some uptake for Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

You can also use services which convert your coin of choice to Bitcoin, for example using shapeshift or for Monero xmr.to which is excellent. You can't avoid the fees on Bitcoin if you do that though...

There are many coins which have cheap and fast confirmations, for example Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.

Monero is pretty good if you need privacy, Ethereum is okay if you need it a bit faster, you can get a confirmed transaction in about a minute with average price (about 20 cents or less in worth)

Ethereum devs are also working on the raiden network which I believe is atm on the testnet and might release sometime the next months.

It has become the gold of the cryptocurrencies world. Nobody uses it to buy stuff but only as a store of value. I'm also disappointed in what it has become, and I say that while currently owning bitcoin.

Ethereum isn't inherently better as a currency. It still has the same scaling limits as bitcoin, just lower utilization at this point.

It has much higher limits though.

Bitcoin is limited to a fixed blocksize and ASIC mining while Ethereum has a dynamically adjusting blocksize to fit the network usage and capabilities.

And IIRC Ethereum is atm handling more Transactions than Bitcoin and ETH TX are arguably more complex, yet the network hasn't broken apart.