Thinking about it: You would never find a "Grounded" multimeter as robust and useful if a path to ground through the multimeter were introduced, modifying the circuit's behaviour and possibly damaging the multimeter with currents.
Why are so many oscilloscopes earth referenced? Upon reading some educational material, a majority of the "common mistakes made by students" are placing the grounding clip incorrectly and causing poor results - when the o-scope is just being used as a fancy voltmeter!
I've heard of a Tek scope having an isolation transformer within.. however ignoring that, and taking in to account that newer DSOs may have plastic cases (isolated from you most importantly I would assume) could I just remove the earthing pin, and install a 1:1 AC transformer inbetween the o-scope and outlet and be on my merry way probing various hot/neutral/earthed sources with no worries about a path to ground any longer through it?
Answer
Oscilloscopes usually require significant power and are physically big. Having a chassis that size, which would include exposed ground on the BNC connectors and the probe ground clips, floating would be dangerous.
If you have to look at waveforms in wall-powered equipment, it is generally much better to put the isolation transformer on that equipment instead of on the scope. Once the scope is connected, it provides a ground reference to that part of the circuit so other parts could then be at high ground-referenced voltages, which could be dangerous. However, you'll likely be more careful not to touch parts of the unit under test than the scope.
Scopes can also have other paths to ground that are easy to forget. For example, the scope on my bench usually has a permanent RS-232 connection to my computer. It would be easy to float the scope but forget about such things. The scope would actually not be floating. At best a fuse would pop when it is first connected to a wall powered unit under test in the wrong place.
Manufacturers could isolate the scope easily enough, but that probably opens them to liability problems. In general, bench equipment is not isolated but hand-held equipment is. If you really need to make isolated measurements often, you can get battery operated handheld scopes.
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