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I don't know how well I'll be able to express this thought, but I'll try: does any human being (we've established Smeagol is human, right?) ever act with only one single motivation- and if not, can they ever be, in this life, wholly good or wholly wicked? It seems to me that there were, in Smeagol (as in Frodo) several different impulses at war with each other; furthermore, some of these were more purely his own than others. His wickedness, which seems to have 'won' in the sense that it influenced most of his actions, was strongly influenced by the power of the ring; on the other hand, any chink of light in him existed in spite of the ring's imfluence, and was therefore more truly his own.
If we judge him, we have to not only weigh the objective morality of each action, but also the degree to which that choice was freely made (think of the Catholic idea of mortal sin requiring not only grave matter, but full knowledge and consent). Certainly, Frodo better resisted the power of the ring; but Frodo also had more help; he was armed with more knowledge, and had Gandalf to guide him from the moment the ring came into his possession. If he had first encountered the ring under the circumstances Smeagol did, he might not have resisted it very well at all.
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