Truth! I have a co-worker who had to jump on getting 2 of them from Newegg. They're nearly impossible to buy now unless you catch a 40% markup on ebay or something. I'm very sorry for all the gamers out there. This isn't fair to them. :( . I just purchased my LTC with good ol' USD. Besides Bitcoin, we both are betting that Litecoin will "go up to da moon!". Specifically, I expect LTC to reach $900 by end of 2014. I have no data whatsoever to back that up with other than the Litecoin-related announcements I sometimes see on various forums of small businesses accepting LTC along with BTC. I'm already holding some[1] and will probably buy a few more if I see another price drop.
Yup, that's exactly how I did it. coinbase.com->BTC-E.com->OfflineWallet. And I'll add extra emphasis on making sure you transfer to an offline wallet(one that only you have the private-key for). I used https://liteaddress.org/ to generate a unique pub/priv pair and as soon as the trade on BTC-E.com from BTC->LTC completed, I sent them to my newly created address. So if BTC-e.com gets hacked(it has happended before), nobody can steal my coins since the private-key is only on my machine.
Also note that both these pages work completely offline. You can git clone the repos. Copy the files to a trusted-offline computer and generate the pub/priv there for extra confidence that the private-key never left your PC.
ExtraNote: Do _NOT_ lose the private key. If you start to obtain lots of value in your coins, make backups of your wallet.dat or even better make sure you have the private-key on a piece of physical paper and properly secured in your home, in case of wallet.dat corruption/misplacement/deleted/etc. Don't end up like this: http://i.imgur.com/oJWtJjl.png
ExtraNote2: Ignore the chatbox(commonly called "trollbox") on btc-e.com. It's nonsense advice that'll lose your money, but it's funny to read. ;)
There are even mining pools such as middlecoin that shift from one scrypt-based alt coin to another depending on what is easiest to mine and sell on exchanges for BTC. As a miner, you don't have to lift a finger, just point cgminer at the pool's address and supply a BTC address for payouts, the pool operator takes care of the rest.
Some smaller altcoins (such as stablecoin) have had to make changes to their difficulty calculations because these pools, with relatively massive amounts of hashing power, come in, push up a coin's difficulty and then leave again once it's no longer profitable. Sitting on the sidelines, it's been really interesting to watch.
1. http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK...