It's all about GPU mining. A CPU won't give you a high enough hash rate to make it worth it. I've got a Quad Core Xeon only giving me 20KH/s which is like 0.01 LTC / day. My old NVidia 9600 GT can mine that fast and NVidia cards are pretty bad at mining. AMD cards are much better for this kind of task.

I don't know all that much about NovaCoin, so I may be wrong here, but I think the draw of Litecoin is that it's similar enough to Bitcoin, except that it uses scrypt it will be more difficult to build FPGAs or ASICs that can mine them more efficiently than GPUs.  This means people who can't afford a nice fancy ASIC can still mine them with their GPUs.  Granted, it's entirely possible that some other coin will become more popular, but for now it's LTC.


I should look into NovaCoin, that sounds cool.

Edit: I did some looking and another thing the Litecoin has going for it over NovaCoin is that, just by google-ing the name, Litecoin has a website where you can get a wallet, whereas NovaCoin is a little harder to find.