What is the economic value of Litecoin? Is it simply a subdivision of BTC? The main differentiator between Litecoin and Bitcoin appears to be the quantity of coins available, the frequency in which the blocks are mined, and the mining technology is different.

The first benefit "Quantity" appears to be a subdivision of another arbitrary fixed value.  Since BTC is easily divisible, I don't see the the benefit of having more units that can also be subdivided.

The second benefit "Frequency" appears to create more blocks for the sake of creating blocks, and the safety zone of one 1 hour double spend attack has changed from 6 blocks BTC to 150 blocks Litecoin.  (no benefit) 

So what economic value does litecoin provide 


During the high value mining period?  (high block reward)
During the low value mining period? (low block reward)


In other words, it seems that the initial differences between BTC and Lightcoin deal with the block reward, but once that is used up (or too low of a value) there isn't much more that makes Lightcoin more exceptional than BTC.
The major difference between litecoin and bitcoin is the hashing function. Bitcoin uses SHA-256 while litecoin uses scrypt. scrypt "is designed to be far more secure against hardware brute-force attacks than alternative functions" [1]. By hardware brute-force attacks they basically mean ASICs such as the ones coming out of butterfly labs. For instance the advantage that GPUs have above CPUs when mining litecoins is much much smaller than the advantage they have for mining bitcoins. It may well be that at some point ASICs will be made for litecoin, but the creators of litecoin specifically chose the hash function to make that happen as far in the future as possible.

The other differences are trivial, but it may be nicer to have confirmations come in faster. The only real difference to having blocks made faster will mean that transactions will sit at 0 confirmations for less time. However still the absolute number of confirmations a transaction is not what makes it safe, but rather the amount of computation that has gone into making those confirmations.