Not particularly relevant to the Wikimedia Foundation (which is using Squid and will probably switch to another open source software web load balancer in the future). But relevant for many/most commercial organizations running large websites.
We use LVS w/ pybal for load balancing, not squid; otherwise, you are right. We don't use hardware load balancers, and likely will not in the foreseeable future.
To be a little more on subject: I don't think it'll be a major difference between using ssl for just login, and using it for all logged in user actions. One of the more expensive parts of https is the connection. If we are logging them in, we are already doing the more expensive part, why not continue on and make the site truly secure?
But really, I should have just ignored this thread since it was mostly a troll.
- Ryan Lane