I don't think it's a scam, no.
Disclaimer: 'it' pays my wages.<p>As another poster mentioned, encryption is worthless without having some kind of validation of the other end-point you're communicating with. Granted, the CA industry has made some mis-steps in this regard (domain-only validation certificates as an example), but we're doing things to rectify this situation albeit slowly (the CAB forum and EV 'green bar' certificates).<p>Not only that, while the cost for certificates I believe can be justified, it's dropped significantly over the years to the point where even the labour-intensive EV certificates can be had for more reasonable costs. Site owners really should be factoring the cost of certificate(s) into the operational costs of owning and running a site nowadays - just as they must with the domain, hosting, dns, email etc.<p>That said people like Eddy Nigg and his company StartCom are driving down the costs of certificates (something I know isn't cheap or easy).
As another poster mentioned, you can get some basic certificates for free, or for not much more than the cost of a domain elsewhere. And with Eddy's efforts, yes - they work in 'most' modern browsers. More power to him.