Weekly Read has one of the few articles which point out that people confuse RSS and push, although it stops short of the reality.
RSS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PUSH.
You go to a URL and pull something down. The reason why people are confused, is that when you use OTHER weblog inspired publishing methodologies in concert with RSS, such as alerting a ping server, then you can push things to a client. A ping server plus HTML and permalinks gives you much the same thing.
RSS gives you clean headlines (and on rare occasions, extra metadata) so in theory you do don’t have to scrape websites. The reality is that you do have to scrape websites (ask Google News) because the majority of RSS doesn’t contain full text for search engine indexing – but that is another story.