Fwiw, all of mine do have distance scales.
What they don't have is a manual aperture ring.

Well, all the Minolta lenses I have put the infinity focusing point
at one end of the travel (looking from the viewfinder side, winding
the lens all the way clockwise). Well, actually, if you do this you
may end up focusing 'past infinity' as infinity is a little way in
from the end of travel (various reasons have been discussed in the
past for this: manufacturing tolerance, thermal expansion and the AF
mechanism).

Of course, you can verify this by switching your camera to manual
focusing and twisting the focus ring one way or the other to find
out where it focuses!

If you want to do landscapes, you may not want to focus at infinity,
but somewhere inwards of it - if you focus at infinity, your depth
of field will be from somewhere in the image to infinity (effectively
wasting the depth of field available 'beyond' infinity), while
you should be able to focus closer and get a depth of field from
somewhere closer than your focal point, through your focal point
and then on to infinity. Many people suggest focusing about 1/3
of the way into the picture - but for a full description of this
you'll want to look up hyperfocal focusing, and maybe play around
with one of the many depth-of-field calculators floating around on
the net. Of course hyperfocusing is easier when there's a focusing
scale on the lens!

If you want more info on all things Minolta, there's a Minolta
users group on Yahoo.

Simon.