If we all came to a unanimous decision about a protocol change, it would still be a big pain to switch / fork. But since we can't even agree, and developers are saying basically "we'll see what happens", to me that means the 1MB limit is going to be with us for quite a while, for good or bad.
So I'm still trying to figure out myself if "artificially" constrained block sizes is "good" or "bad" for bitcoin. My feeling is that either with the 1MB limit, or without a hard limit, the system will work, but it will work for somewhat different purposes.
But would you all agree that regardless of desirability, we will see blocks really hitting that limit hard, and stuff really affected by it, before any protocol change occurs? (If it ever does.)
I'm not sure if you can really call it a "hard" fork. Some people could change the limit today without really effecting the network since we aren't really hitting the limit yet. And it would make the most sense for us to change it now so by the time people start hitting the 1MB limit, it won't be an issue.
Regardless, it isn't really up to the core developers anymore. The developers at slush or deepbit could change the limit today. It'd be risky to try to propagate a block today over the limit, but if the larger miners got together and decided on a date to collectively change the limit, there'd be a higher success rate. The incentives are there, its just a matter of time.
No doubt in my mind that artificially limiting the block size to increase miner fees will bring great success to the next cryptocurrency that does away with the block size limit.