The update frequency results in some trade-offs.
Faster updates increase the exposure to isolation attacks-- where a partitioned part of the network speeds back up to the nominal speed. Faster updates also increase the amount of oscillation possible. On the plus side they make the network respond faster to changes.
Many altcoins have changed to faster rules, but the vast majority have managed to do it in wrong and vulnerable ways. For example: Some apply a sliding window filter but then apply the same change over and over again instead of it's n-th root, causing massive oscillation. Others use the timestamp of the immediately prior block to set the current difficulty-- this lets you set your timestamp slightly lower than you should in order to make the next block have epsilon higher difficulty and thus guarantee it will win in a race due to having more total work. Other schemes have wild non-linearities that make it a lot more profitable for miners to mine in bursts rather than continually.
When I look at all the different ways other rules have been messed up, and how inconsequential the 'slow' updates in Bitcoin have been in practice. I think Bitcoin's creator made a good decision, all considered.
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