I've very rarely seen Bitstamp come up in any of these conversations. I know nothing about them...but, looking at their site, I can see that there's no way they will be preferred for first time BTC buyers from the US. It's not even a contest, because Bitstamp isn't even in the running for US buyers. Coinbase will fund your account via ACH from a US bank. Nobody else will. Thus, anybody wanting to start with Bitcoin in the US is going to go with Coinbase.

I'm gonna assume you're outside of the US; the difficulty and expense of sending an international wire from a US bank is rarely grasped by people outside of the US. My bank charges $40 for a wire transfer in US dollars, and more for one in the destination currency. My first BTC purchase was only ~$300...the wire transfer would have been more than 10% of that.

I agree that Coinbase running out of coins would have had an impact. But, I noticed that they were replenishing them relatively quickly...I tried to make a buy one evening, was told the daily coin limit had been reached, and an hour later was able to buy, and bought a little more the next morning.

I suspect they were sitting at their computers all night during the run up to $1000, trying to manage fraud while also trying to buy and sell as many BTC as possible.

Anyway, I'd be surprised if there's another big spike...but, a gradual climb back up to $1k and beyond does seem entirely realistic to me.