Litecoin was one of the first altcoins to appear so it was heavily inspired by the ideas behind Bitcoin. In fact, it is made to be the currency that will address the major drawbacks of Bitcoin. It is 4x faster (2.5 vs 10 minutes for releasing a block) and mining is somewhat easier.
It certainly has been over the years, even though there were short term fluctuations that are inevitable for any currency. But at the end of the day, it has always been in the top 5 cryptocurrencies.
It is traded on almost all reputable exchanges, so its very easy to get a hold of it. However with the current price at $151 only did you think it has a high probability of increasing in price drastically possibly competing with bitcoin in the future as a means of storing value??
I love Litecoin and it was in fact my very first alt (unless you count Dogecoin, which I actually received as a prize) that I owned, and I grew to like it more and more especially last year when they were the first to do Segwit and pave the way for Bitcoin.
I would not say that faster blocks and confirmations are a good distinction though, since most alts anyway have the same "advantage" but yes it is the true alternative of a payment currency. You cannot go wrong with Litecoin in this regard.