This is also my experience. Almost everybody doing a PhD that I have met is doing so out of personal interest in the subject area. I think pretty much everybody understands that as a career path academia sucks, but they do it because they love the research they are doing (well, most of the time, from time to time you've got to hate it ;)). People doing a PhD generally seem to understand that this is not the path to making a lot of money, and most of them seem qualified enough to do something in industry if they wanted to.