I'm not so sure they'll be able to free up the lost bitcoins. What heuristic can you use to determine it lost and not just being saved? Bitcoin is supposed to be anonymous afterall, so you shouldn't be able to tell that this address belongs to a person who died and will never use those coins.

One thing that will need to happen though is some way for the blockchain to be truncated. It is growing exponentially and it won't be long, a year or so and you'll have to spend $100 or more in storage space to have the chain. Not to mention personal pcs don't particularly like having dbs with that much data in them.