What is the easiest way to programmatically obtain the current USD-BTC spot price? E.g., if I wanted to create a cron script that would grab the latest spot price every hour and store it in a local file or database, what would be the place to "scrape" that information from?

(Actually writing the script is not the problem, in my case.)
You could use the JSON encoded ticker data available from MtGox at: https://mtgox.com/api/0/data/ticker.php

Just use whatever your language's equivalent to cURL or wGet is and parse as appropriate.