Non-academic scholarships can be good, I think. Hey, anything that helps counter the cost of tuition is good, right?
But what you've got to realize is, most scholarships (even non-academic ones) require you to maintain a certain GPA or meet other conditions, and if you don't, then you're up the creek. I used to be really biased towards people with athletic scholarships, mostly because the people I knew who had them didn't have to do nearly the amount of work to pass a class as the rest of us (they had to keep a good GPA to play, so profs were lenient with them). I was pretty darn jealous of my boyfriend, too, because he was on an athletic scholarship...until he got injured and couldn't play, and poof! there went his scholarship money.
It was like the school just said, "Oh, well, you're no good to us anymore, so we're taking away your money." Not cool.
So I guess my point is that non-academic scholarships aren't just free money with no strings attached...you have to work to keep them, just like you do with an academic scholarship.