You make a good point in that this could be absorbed as an implicit cost of a client project - but tell me again, why would we do this, when we can simply use BitBucket and create as many repositories as we like, without any problems whatsoever?
Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.
If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.
Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.