1. It can be scaled downwards as far as needed
2. It is based on divisions of 1000 like the SI system
3. It uses the familiarity of 100 "subcoins" per "coin".
My preference, and I'm not sure yet how many share this opinion, is to leave cents in the past where they belong and have something like:
1 = 1 bitcoin
0.001 = 1 millicoin
0.000001 = 1 microcoin
0.000000001 = 1 nanocoin
0.000000000001 = 1 picocoin
My preference is to keep it as simple as possible, to avoid barriers to entry, and I think avoiding "cents" achieves that.
Beyond that, let users decide based on usage and custom. I daresay that there
will be places - online and in meat-space - where people use "cents", because it makes sense for them to do so. I don't think we should encourage that, however, because it will serve to discourage other users, for whom "cents" is meaningless. Equally, I daresay there will be places where people never need to go below the decimal point. They'll use their own terminology, too.
Where I am (the UK) it's become customary to refer to £1000 as "a grand", or, more recently, "1K". There's nothing official about that, but they're useful, just as "buck" and "quid" are useful, even though they're completely unofficial.
Our default position should be: "there is a bitcoin, and it can be subdivided. Do your worst, people!" It's not helpful to replace that with, at the worst extreme, something like: "there is a bitcoin. One hundredth of a bitcoin is a cent, and 0.00000001 bitcoins is a satoshi and - are you writing this all down? Good! - when cents or satoshis aren't appropriate we use SI units."
