Please stop the "Gavin's decision" meme, too: I went with the in-the-moment consensus when it became clear that it was POSSIBLE to switch to the 0.7 fork.
And as Melbustus said: that was only possible because the split was close to 50/50. If more miners had already upgraded to 0.8, an alert would have been sent to non-0.8 peers telling them to either upgrade or shutdown until we could find a workaround for the problem.