The only question is when does it happen and who will lose out because of it.
The really important question is what would have happened if there wasn't a coordinated effort to help the "correct" fork?
The longer one would have won.
Depending on how much power is already at the new clients, this could have disabled the old clients from the network - made them obsolete.
Which maybe would have been a good thing, considering that this needs to happen anyway, if we don't want to wait weeks for our transactions to get mined, in a month time or so.