Indeed higher scores are said to make the player feel like he's playing better, and hence could enhance user experience. This needs to be experimented for you to really find if this makes a difference in your specific game. If you compare an arcade game like Every Extend Extra Extreme and a platformer like Mario, the effect score has on the player is widely different.
As Maik said, higher scores are not only easier on the programming side of things, but are generally much easier for the user to understand at a glance.
Whether you give your player 100 points for a coin, or 2000 doesn't matter: if it is the first object a player picks up in a game, this will be his "score reference". (In this case though I would said 100 points is inherently easier to understand than 2000, but that's more in the realm of psychology).
In my opinion, what's important then is not to necessarily have a high score reference, just an understandable one. What could really give the player satisfaction is when you give him 5000 points instead of the default 200 because he did something well.
A great game for user satisfaction in my opinion is Peggle by PopCap.
In Peggle, when you finish the level, you get a zoom and slow-mo on the last peggle, and huge explosions when you hit it. Very nice. Any bonuses you get multiply your score by huge amounts, again with colourful explosions everywhere.
What is interesting is the mix of visually pleasing feedback, and score multipliers; if I remember correctly, the base score for a peggle is also 100 points, 500 for the ones needed to complete the level. 1 & 5 are mathematically the same, but probably less easy to understand when things are hectic and your score is going up constantly.
So easy, understandable base scores, and huge bonuses and multipliers for doing things well. (Lovely explosions and classical music is also win ^^).
I know that some of the top companies are currently recruiting "Score Designers" to think out how players should be awarded; this shows that it's not something that's simple, and is probably worth investing time into to do right.