I find it amazing people don't just dump every LTC they have.  What is the reasoning it will stick around?  Go read about the next 20 altcoins and each one will have far more innovation and features than LTC.

Starting with the top you have Bitshares.

10 second block times.
Soon to be released features that give it same functionality as Ripple with the User-Issued Assets.
Market pegged assets.  (BTC38 - a well known Chinese exchange is allowing people to deposit CNY with bitCNY - woah thats HUGE)
Blockchain inflates at a rate less than BTC mining while spending all that capital on marketing and development for the network as opposed to giving it to electricity and mining hardware companies.
Operates on a small fraction of the power consumption that LTC and BTC do.
Will scale to transaction levels higher than BTC.