BitCoin does not offer all the things that some people want. It's not anonymous. It's traceable by design. It's online. It requires authentications, which takes a while.
There's lots of different properties one can want in a currency that BitCoin doesn't provide, and it's probably impossible to make a currency that matches EVERY wish EVERY person on earth has. States try that with fiat currencies and fail.
Of course, but Bitcoin clones won't satisfy those needs, which I think is what the OP is referring to. Some of the properties you've mentioned require radically different designs and others can be built on top of Bitcoin and don't make much sense as independent alternatives.
Litecoin is billed as the silver to bitcoins gold. It's healthy to have more than one virtual currency.
It's healthy, but having clones with minor differences is also redundant. I don't want to undervalue the Litecoin development efforts, I agree that it's valuable even if solely as an experiment, but I don't think it's very helpful as a competitor. If it was more scalable than Bitcoin, which silver is, compared to gold, then that bill would make sense. However as it stands, Litecoin is almost the same deal.