What sort of shell prompt do you get with telnet:bbsmates.com or any of the other telnet-BBSs out there? I would think that while such sites aren't a lot better than non-https: password-protected sites, they at least divvy the password among different packets in such a way that one can't simply look for packets containing a string like "&password=foobar".
I wouldn't put any sensitive data on a computer open to the net that is running telnetd.
As for packet sniffing for passwords being easier on non-ssl websites, that might well be true if you don't have very sophisticated sniffing tools. I'm pretty sure that with wireshark, (i.e. tcpdump), you can tell it to show "sessions" where a dialogue between two systems is highlighted, making the login pretty much stand out almost as well.