I saw a post on one of the bitcoin news sites the other day talking about gavin's discussion at mitbitcoinclub and they were saying that he still says a hard-fork to increase transaction size is in the works. That he thinks it won't be in the next version but possibly could be in the one after. That he has to achieve consensus on with the "5 core developers" which have push access to the git repo.
There is no reason not to go forward with the fork actually. The anti-fork brigade will probably be disregarded.
I'm pretty sure that everyone will thank Gavin once the blocks go over 1MB.
I haven't followed all the technical details but there was some pretty strong words about how the anti-fork brigade had a plan to attack the forked blockchain and it *seemed* reasonably scary what they were saying. Maybe it was overblown? Maybe some of those folks have come around now?