Using faucets is nice and all, but this is about actually mining Ether on a public testnet. I want to compare the utility to my alternative: fire up a new public/private testnet by forking a whole new blockchain.
Why? Application development. Stress testing. Could be useful if I want to get hold of large quantities of Eth - for giggles for for some legit purpose in my app. Let's say my app wants to use it as a kind of distributed database and up the level of transactions going in and out. With my own blockchain, this would be infinite. But I maybe do not need that level of function.
Faucets, in the end, maybe sufficient for me to design and test my app before proper launch on mainnet. Then again, what if I want to squirt free tokens to my friends during the launch etc....
