It would be nice if there was some way that using the standard client you might be able to adjust the fee schedule for your own purposes and set ‘policies’ for mining blocks and including transactions. I think that is a source of confusion here as no such user interface is currently provided for doing that.
Much of this is all theoretical at the moment because it is possible to make transactions ‘for free’ and generally get them included in the next block at the moment. I don’t see that is going to be sustainable in the long run, but we’ll see how that goes.
At the moment, it is important that most people using Bitcoins are simply hoping that the currency succeeds at all and aren’t interested in making a killing or even a modest profit at it, which is why transaction fees are still mostly non-existent on the network.