scp gets confused when destination directory is missing.

Hm... Or it tells you can't copy a file and make it a directory?

In this case it's what you get if you try to create a nonexistent directory
(with trailing slash) using open(), as the following short C program demonstrates:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int fd = open("nonexistent/", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT);
    if (fd < 0) {
        perror("open");
        return 1;
    }
    close(fd);
    return 0;
}

scp probably ought to be a little bit more careful; calling verifydir() when the
target ends in '/' would do it, I think. Still, it's minor.

True, this is a cosmetic bug, but it's still confusing. It got be confused for a
while there until i figured out that i had mistyped bug/ as bugs/.

confirmed in gutsy. This is minor, but we should push it upstream.

Still seeing this in gutsy 32bit. This can be pretty confusing/frustrating. I was trying to copy to a user directory that didn't exist. I spent about 15 min trying to figure this out (and I use linux everyday). Small things like this could be super frustrating for a newish user who wasn't sure if they were doing things correctly.

I've forwarded this bug upstream and attached a patch there.

This bug is still here on 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It's quite annoying.