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I'm a little surprised that those uncalibrated pain scales enjoy such wide use; with no obvious anchors, I'd expect people's subjective responses to them to vary quite a bit. Since this doesn't seem to be the case, I suppose most people are anchoring on something I'm not.
The last time I was asked for a pain rating (doctor's visit following trauma to an eardrum), I hemmed and hawed over it for a while and finally interpreted it as a quasi-logarithmic scale with 1 being the least perceptible discomfort definable as such. This seemed to confuse the nurse.
I was talking to a paramedic, who uses a 1-10 pain scale as part of his patient assessment. He said that it's common to have a patient reply "ten" and then the paramedic would say something like "When your wife gave birth to your child, that was a ten. Are you sure this is a ten?" after which the patient decides that the pain is actually more like a five.