EDIT: Actually, I read through the Bitcoin protocol docs and found the 'alert' message (see:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#alert) that can be propagated across the network by @artos. It appears he needs to change the Bitcoin ECDSA pubkey that's set in the source code to his own ECDSA pubkey to make use of it. It's intended to be used to send messages about upcoming forks and it appears it will even communicate these messages to the GUI client's status bar. Cool feature that shows some insight from the BTC developers.
Yes, making use of this would be a good idea, but even better if the client could detect a fork before the developer takes action.
BTW, I have a few old -qt clients for various obscure/dead altcoins which alert me about mandatory
Litecoin upgrades every time I start them.
