During the last weeks I've read dozens of forum posts from people suggesting to use Litecoins instead of Bitcoins. Several of them also here on bitcointalk, but none of them provides technical evidence of why Litecoin should be better (or even comparable) to Bitcoins. My personal opinion is that Litecoin is inferior from a protocol and implementation point of view and that other alt-currencies (such as PPCoin) would be a much better alternative than Litecoin. I've listed my reasons for this assumptions below. I'd be interested in counter-arguments to my points and in a discussion about the benefits of Litecoins.

In my opinion those are the main disadvantages of Litecoin:

• Litecoin doesn't provide significant technological advantages in comparison to Bitcoin. My first question when seeing an alt-currency is "Why should I use this?". Some alt-currencies have good answers to this question. For example, PPCoin's proof-of-stake mining looks extremely innovative making PPCoin a possible candidate for a Bitcoin 2.0 network. Litecoin, in comparison, is just a relatively straightforward copy of the Bitcoin code. (I know about Scrypt and the shorter confirmation times. However, those are just minor changes and neither of them provides any major advantages.)
• The client code is essentially unmaintained and based on an outdated Bitcoin version. In one of the most recent Litecoin commits the authors even had to remove a warning from the source code, preventing the client from reporting that it is obsolete. None of the newer security and performance improvements of the Bitcoin code made it into Litecoin.
• The price is purely driven by speculation. There are currently next to zero applications for Litecoins. The only thing one can do with them is buying them on an exchange and hoping that they can be sold for more money at some later point. If I'd felt like gambling I'd rather use Satoshi Dice with Bitcoins instead.
• The fact that Mtgox announced it will support Litecoins sounds like a red herring. If they support one alt-currency they are likely to also support some other alt-currencies. So why invest in overpriced Litecoins, when there are other alt-currencies that are cheaper and provide real technological advantages?

So for the Litecoin supporters: Which advantages does Litecoin have? And is there any client software that's actually maintained?