Velcro would be decidedly cheap and tacky. It would also not be very durable. As for a ratchet, I'm not entirely sure what this would look like, but it might be doable. It wouldn't have the nice feel of MagSafe regardless, though.

As for differently laid-out magnets, I believe Apple's patent is pretty broad, and basically covers any magnetic attachment of a power supply to an electronic device. Supposedly (according to Wikipedia) some Japanese appliances have magnetic connectors, so it's questionable how valid Apple's claim is. I guess the real issue is whether anyone wants to fight Apple over this. And to be fair, Apple clearly put out a genuine innovation here.

Inductive chargers would be awesome for docks, but don't seem very useful for mobile use. Setting an inductive charger down and then placing a laptop on it means that a pulled cord still drags the laptop with it. Unless inductive chargers have gotten a lot better, they need to basically be in contact with the laptop, so having a separate device just sitting near the laptop would be inefficient (unless I'm wrong about this, in which case an inductive charging cube would be awesome).

I agree that it seems PC laptops should have some way of improving the power connection. The status quo is crappy.