That's a good question, but there's actually also a good reason why it's difficult to get an account for free. It all has to do with the fact that all transactions on the blockchain uses resources, so someone has to pay for them. Right now we get bandwidth that regenerates based on how much Steem Power we have on our account. It will be changed to another system in the next hardfork, so keep an eye out for that.

Anyway, this means that all new accounts need to have a certain amount of Steem Power to actually be able to use the blockchain, and where does this come from?

Right now Steemit Inc. is using their own funds to delegate Steem Power to new users who sign up on steemit.com. Since it costs money for them to create accounts, they want to manually approve them in order to prevent situations where people create a thousand accounts and upvote themselves (that would get them control of 14,000 SP!).

So that's why it's difficult to get a Steem account without paying for it. Luckily there are some proposed changes to this in the next hardfork, which will allow people to mine their own account. Hopefully things will be a bit more manageable once it is released.