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Think of it like a dollar. Do you need to own the entire dollar? No, you can have 5 or 10c, who owns the rest of the dollar? Who cares, not you. In the same way that a dollar is divisible down to 0.01 of a dollar (maybe not physically but you can pay $0.99 for something on your card or transfer $0.01 to my bank account if you like), Bitcoin is divisible down to 0.00000001 of a bitcoin.
In terms of purchasing, there are exchanges where you can place bids, similar to the share market, except you can bid for fractions of a bitcoin. There is no benefit in holding an entire bitcoin.
Responding to swaggytrader, if the US government could have stamped it out in its early stages, they would have, as they did with previous attempts at creating a digital currency. The fact is that they couldn't, its distributed nature made it such that in order to stamp it out, you would need to stamp out every single participant in the network, which was impossible. Before Bitcoin would have even been on their radar, it would have had network participants running nodes all over the world, and these would have been people smart enough to be running VPNs and what not to obscure their locations, hence impossible to track down and stamp out. The design of the Bitcoin protocol is what allowed it to survive, and to this day, never be hacked or compromised, not even once. This, along with its algorithmically defined distribution of an ever-decreasing quantity of new coins, is what makes bitcoin such a spectacle, as well as an extremely practical store of value.
