There is indeed spam -- for instance, what is the use of pushing outputs that require significantly more fees than the output is worth in order to re-spend them? It's pure spam.
Fees as a "spam" disincentive isn't working very well then, is it?
If you need to send someone Sataoshis, the recipient doesn't care about the fees-they still demand the Satoshis.
At some point the miners will push for not including transactions with zero or low fees at all, then Bitcoin will be another mainstream banking product.