I've been starting the httpsd daemon and it dies on start-up. Now I don't have a certificate yet, but shouldn't I be able to get to the default splash page on port 80?

You'll at least need a test certificate before the server will start properly. The problem with the startup scripts claiming that the processes are still running is the fact that they did start ok, but httpsd exited immediately when it didn't find a certificate. If you really need to run without a certificate, comment out all the SSL stuff in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and restart or -HUP the httpd daemon.