When I made the site I debated whether to include frames or not. The justification I used was that I as a user (not just the creator of the site) would actually want a small toolbar that would allow me to navigate quickly between aggregated sites (it aggregates image sites, so I tend to move quickly between pages), and view the sometimes funny captions people give the images.
I can understand your annoyance though. Content creators should have a choice whether to be framed or not... and they do, but like you said not a lot of people know about framing sites and/or how to break them.
StumbleUpon is an example of framing content right...a simple unobtrusive toolbar. I used that site as inspiration for a website I created during my spare time. Link: http://www.picahuna.com
I don't think there's anything necessarily scummy about framing content. In the case of StumbleUpon and my site, there's a benefit to the user experience, and visitors can immediately start using the site without installing an extension. Furthermore, StumbleUpon actually increases traffic to your site.
A lot of this is common sense, but it's so easy to get caught up in all the noise that it deserves repeating.