Oh, so you are kidding, kidding about overlooking the GUI, ease-of-use, rate of block-chain synchronization, Linux binaries, and so on. Funny man.
No, LiteCoin wasn't a winner because of "minor changes", it was a winner because of scrypt, a relatively major change compared to Bitmonoronorono, along with the fact that "altcoin" was a practically a new concept. And, don't forget booming popularity causing an influx of new users wanting a piece of the cake on an already proven, mostly stable platform. Unlike Bytecoin, Bitcoin is actually big and can take a hit.
It's as simple as installing Ubuntu 13.10, extracting a zip to a folder, and typing "make" into a terminal. It's literally that easy. Then you run the daemon and the wallet and type "start_mining". How could it be any easier?
There's instructions for Windows too:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=544715Litecoin was a simple fork of Tenebrix with 4x Bitcoin parameters. Tenebrix introduced scrypt. Coblee made Litecoin in three hours (I would know, I talked to him at the conference last week).
When Litecoin came out, alt coins were not a new concept -- there were plenty of scam/useless coins (SolidCoin, Tenebrix, Ixcoin, I0coin) then too.