Excellent article.
However, since it was written the Lord Lyon has given his official view (which may be found under “Lairds” on the Lyon Court website. In it he affirms that Laird and Lord are not interchangeable and that Laird is not even a title but a respectful description normally attributed to a landowner by his tenants (kind of hard to have tenants on a 1sq ft plot that is so small that even a skinny person like me would encroach on his neighbours plots).
He further states that the Laird is an innapropriate term for a normal householder and even less so for the owner of a souvenir plot. Of course, the scammers claim that his opinion is irrelevant as the new lairds are not seeking grants of arrms.
Then in the Spring of 2012, the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland felt it necessary to place an article in the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland (this may be found at the Journal On-line.co.uk (April 2012)): she defines a souvenir plot under the terms of the Land Registration (Scotland) Act 1979 and warns that the land may only be held by personal right and therefore the purchaser has no right against any third party (eg a person to whom the laird scam sell the estate, who having registered the land has a real right).
This combined with the duplicity of the vendors regarding their conservation efforts (please visit Scots-titles.com for lively debate in the Forums and up to date info) and the anything but independent review sites, means that the best advice is that of Rob Gibson MSP “…avoid it with a bargepole”.