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CarlShulman comments on High school activities and medical school admissions - Less Wrong
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You left out different grading standards at different schools, and the strength of the competition where grading is on a curve. That is a major difference between schools which pushes against many elite schools. A strong student who was (unreasonably) certain they wanted to go to professional school in a field like medicine or law where entrance tests and GPA play such strong roles would have a plausible case for racking up easy As at a low-competition school (which would be cheaper if their family was wealthy enough to face the undiscounted price at top schools).
However, in practice I would be wary of such advice because of the networking and other benefits of elite undergraduate colleges for other fields such as entrepreneurship and politics, or the preparation for technical fields.
I thought about this, but I wasn't able to find compelling data supporting the view that less prestigious schools have laxer grading standards.
Wikipedia's page on grade inflation says that the average GPA at Harvard during 2004 was 3.48, contrasting with 3.05 at UC San Diego. This is consistent with grading standards being roughly the same at the two schools.
Anecdotally, I haven't noticed much variance in grading standards for the same course across the ~4 colleges that I've had personal exposure to. I would guess that grading standards vary far more across different courses at a fixed institution than they do for a fixed course across different institutions.