Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.
That advantage has been proven to be false, after the GPU miner was released, it was found that GPU's were much faster at mining LTC.
If you ask me, that was the biggest advantage for Litecoin. The secondary advantages are that confirmations occur 4 times faster (one every 2.5 minutes or 150s) and that the limit of maximum coins is also 4 times higher.
This will be important once bitcoin hits mainstream, but that's atleast 5 years away, plenty of more useful currencies could come out by then.
Either way, it's crashing right now, so I'm buying in on the way down. In it for the long haul
