I've been avoiding looking too deeply into the game, hoping for some freshness when it arrives. Until last night, when I gave in and started checking the Blizz forums for Diablo III, where I found quite a lot of discussion about the in game Real Money Auction House. 10 years ago, Diablo II's rampant duping and botting issues meant players could sell in game items for real money on sites like eBay. That practice is still a huge money maker today. Blizz has apparently decided to take advantage of that by allowing trading of items and even entire characters for real money, within the game itself. Rather than pay Blizz directly for items, players will pay each other. For the hardcore players and botters it appears that hundreds of dollars can be earned a month by playing the game and selling drops. For the World of Warcraft Chinese farmers, it'll be like mana from heaven.

Is it just me, or does this concept seem a bit much?

None of this is new to WoW players. Just remember Blizz doesn't really exist anymore it's all Activation now. Right after BC came out many people got fired from Blizzard. Good news for use since the rumor mill says Bioware hired 27 of them for SW: TOR.
During the early days of WoW there never would be a transfer of any kind allowed. Now you can do it all, for a fee. Move from one faction to another, change sexes, change races, and the biggest one of all the one that would never happen if Blizz was still around, Move from a PVE to a PVP server. Oh the horror.

It's a bit of a non-issue for me.

I'll most probably play D3 exclusively as a single-player offline game, so I couldn't care less if somewhere on this planet someone sits in front of his PC and his char runs around with a magicP0nwz0rSwordofKickass+5 he just bought for 50 bucks.

This kind of player-player trade is IMO far less annoying than official item shops where game companies sell virtual stuff for real money.

Doesn't sound to me like this is pay to play (like WOW), normal play will be free but people who want to take the easy way out can buy their way into advanced items or cosmetic items, the same way that many other games do.

Team Fortress 2 has a pay store for items, but all of them can also be found randomly or crafted, and I often hear naysayers talk about how the items ruined TF2 but it's obvious they never played it otherwise they would know no one forces people to buy the additional items or hats and you can play fine without buying a single one, all it does is provide some people a way to buy things they don't want to wait to earn and it allows the developer another way to fund continued development for patches and updates without having to come out with a yearly new version of the game with limited enhancements like the COD series does.

Personally as long as Diablo3 doesn't become a monthly pay service like WOW, I have no problem with a built-in store as long as the items can still be legitimately found or crafted by normal players.

I didn't mean "pay to play", like WoW, I meant "getting paid to play".

Ah I see what you mean then, I guess then I don't really have a problem if someone wants to pay for items others found/crafted or traded for, hopefully it won't be abused.