Ripple has been pre-mined and is not decentralized, but in fact controlled by one entity (regardless of what the creators may claim).
There is a huge difference here. Not even a comparison.
Issues of coin distribution and mining versus no mining is a separate concern. From my vantage point, the great majority of LTC belong to Litecoin founders/investors/miners while the great majority of XRP belong to Ripple founders/investors/gateway-partners. There are trade-offs with either distribution scheme, but "coins to miners" is just one scheme (not the defining criteria for decentralization).
Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago.
It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.
This is important because the price of XRP is not very stable now. If you wanted to keep offers up for USD to EUR, it would be very irritating if you had to pull down and replace a USD->XRP and XRP->EUR offer every time the price of XRP changed (to prevent one order from being too good and the other too bad). Also, if you couldn't place a USD->EUR offer, what would you do if you really wanted to trade USD for EUR? You can't place an XRP->EUR offer because you don't have the XRP yet. And if you place a USD->XRP offer, you wind up with XRP that you didn't want.
In the future, if the price of XRP becomes more stable, order books to and from XRP may become more popular. But still people who just don't want XRP will place offers on order books directly between assets other than XRP.
Whether or not XRP is a currency is really an arbitrary thing. I just want people to understand what XRP is and what its role in Ripple is. If they think that makes it a currency, then fine. If they think it doesn't, also fine.
First, OpenCoin pre-mined the XRP's so they could hack the cryptocurrency trend and make tons of money if their currency took off.
Second, Ripple is NOT a decentralized currency, but in fact a "distributed" currency, which is actually a much bigger deal than you might think. This means it has a single point of failure, can be easily abused by the creators, and is extremely vulnerable to intervention by governments and other big players.
(You can read all about it here: http://ripplescam.org/)
Bottom line: the strength of a currency depends almost entirely on the trust in that currency, and I have no reason whatsoever to place trust in ripples. It's a wiser move to put your money in a non-scam currency, like Bitcoin or Litecoin.