Are bitcoin/alt coin transactions really cheap? If they are now, will they continue to be in future??

What particularly drew me to digital coins was the promise of micro payments; I envisioned use of block chain technologies to truly enable machine to machine transactions - payments of the size of 1/100th of a cent but still adding up to something significant because of large volumes of those transactions.

With that vision in mind, I started toying around; got hold of a very small quantity of ETH to test out the speed/cost/ease of transactions and get my feet wet.

Here's my experience:
I made a transfer of a measly 0.3 ETH using 200,000 gas
Transaction time: about 2 minutes - pretty impressed :)
Transaction Cost: 200,000 gas equating to about $3 - that's a lot of money for a $100 transaction!! :(
User Experience: Not very impressed, copying and pasting addresses is definitely not fun. Also, there is always an element of insecurity at the back of your mind - did I paste in the right/complete address, I hope it's not the private address, am I on the right wallet url, etc.? Perhaps we will see this improve as wallets improve - offer features to save wallet address as nick names, etc. But at the moment - there is so much research that is required to make a transaction :(

One would argue that if I had used less gas my cost of transaction would have been significantly less - but that would have come at a cost of delayed transaction. I see it's a trade off and depending on the specific scenario and need, transactions can be setup to either offer a more speedy transaction for higher gas or perhaps sent to a queue for lower gas and lesser cost.

Transactions are validated through mining and their speed is dependent on the computing power, which in turn depends on computing power. Users are incentivized to provide computing power in return for generated coins and the service charge.

With increasing volume, the need for computing power will increase which has an intrinsic cost - hardware & electricity. BTC and many alt-coins will cease to generate new blocks - does that mean that service charge will be the only way forward to offer incentives? If that's the case, then are we heading towards perpetually increasing transaction costs!

I'd appreciate comments/input to help allay this concern of mine.