But this initiative (however good) will also not provide a no-barrier approach. You need to be a member of the coop (with associated fees) to request certificates.
Which is logical. Running a CA and getting the root certificate into the right places is not cheap.
Unless someone with money (e.g. Google, as they do with their CDN) decides to provide this service for free some money needs to be earned.
All of Google's free services (CDN, DNS, Chrome, etc) are centred around improving the experience of using the web, so more people use it for longer (and, hopefully, do more searches with Google and/or visit more webpages with AdSense ads on them). I'm not sure how more SSL-secured traffic feeds into that, exactly, but if anyone at Google wants to talk sponsorship, I'm all ears...
Which is logical. Running a CA and getting the root certificate into the right places is not cheap. Unless someone with money (e.g. Google, as they do with their CDN) decides to provide this service for free some money needs to be earned.