A much better middle ground would have been for websites to advertise certain features (login, user accounts) and for browsers to warn when not using SSL. Or to do it based on some heuristic, such as cookie use on a given domain.
The current implementation keeps everyone non-technical from using http, which is a loss for everyone.
Google unilaterally got to make this decision for everyone. Small websites don't matter to their bottom line anymore. They've already scraped and indexed the content, pulled the value away onto walled gardens, and left that web to rot.
