SMTs can be configured to have their own inflation, reward distribution rules, etc and can be set to ignore Steem Power of the accounts and only use the vests in SMTs to determine reward allocation. The last point is the reason why the current steem power distribution will be a mute point.

I can see existing steem apps issuing their own tokens (busy, chainbb, dtube, utopian, zappl, etc). Of course the success of these and other projects will depend on the growth that they can obtain outside of the Steem ecosystem which also applies on platforms that launch on other blockchains.