Did a quest that resulted in an orc telling me I will be welcome in his camp. Cool, I wanted to get some orc armor for my follower.

I head up to the camp, find the blacksmith, and check his inventory, only to find he's not selling orc armor. He's selling elven crap.

I would expect the orcs to have a little more pride than that.

Agreed, the effect you're seeing is a design choice I don't really like. Having nearly totally random items on vendors makes me mentally sort of lump them all together. Nothing distinguishes one "general goods" vendor from another, or one blacksmith from another. One of the few exceptions is Eorland Grey-mane. I would have liked to see more of what you suggest, which is less interchangeable vendors and more distinction based on location, race, forge, or whatever.

I hear you. I really, really, really hate the lack of specialized vendors. I hate that you can get any item anywhere.

Orcs are Elves...

Anyways, i though there wasn't any orc armor?

I'm normally not a huge critic of scaling, but seeing Cletus Backwoods selling high level armor with powerful enchants always bugs me.

hrmm. comments like this make me worry.

I've found an orc hat, but I don't recall seeing other orcish armour. Though I'm terribly unobservant and tend to not pay attention.

Anyway, I thought orcs sold elf and onion soup. Oh, wait, that's trolls, isn't it? Or is it ogres? I forget now.

I wish shops actually had unique inventories that didn't scale to my level.

It's one of the things that really bothers me about the game.

Orc not selling any orcish weirded me out as well. The comments above about orc armor I'm really hoping are just trolls. You can get a full suit really easily.

Why?

Orcs are elves. They are known as Orsimer, note the 'mer' at the end of that. Mer means 'elf' which is why you see it in Dunmer, Altmer, Falmer and Bosmer, all the elven races. It is not a coincidence, Orcs are elves.
It seems you weren't actually worried by the claim that Orcs are Elves, rather that somebody hadn't known about Orcish. This makes my post rather irrelevant. Oh well I guess its just a fun fact now.

Also Maormer (Sea Elves) and Dwemer (which should be enough to explain which race they belong to, yet people still think they're dwarves :rolleyes:)

I've found a complete set of orcish armor in some dungeon whose name I don't remember, but the only orcish equipment I could ever buy were arrows. I wonder why nobody sells the armor?

http://uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Armor

Under Heavy.

This is more of a problem of the world leveling system than with any lore problem. If there were different grades of orcish and elven armor, then yeah, it would seem odd, but there aren't. Elven armor is just another name for "Level 2 Light Armor" and Orcish armor just "Level 3 Heavy Armor." It's a simplistic approach, a poor wrapper over a poor leveling system.

As for the whole Orcs from Elves thing; I thought that was the common story from Tolkein. But I googled it and it is a lot more complex. REALLY complex. If the amount of research that goes into discovering the origin of fictional characters, instead went into discovering medical breakthroughs...