"This sort of thing is a risk for those operating exchanges and payment processors, not for end users."
How so?
Any double-spend is a risk for anyone receiving BTC, surely? You sell something on an ebay equivalent, someone sends you BTC, you send the goods but later find out there was a fork and double-spend situation, what happens?
It is - but how long do people wait before sending goods on ebay? If you're sending them a couple of hours later you check to make sure it's ok before you send. Ebay is a case where bitcoin works well because you can afford to wait before sending the goods. Realtime processing is where bitcoin really isn't safe.
Is there a mechanism that alerts of these forks in the blockchain? In this case it seems that something as simple as a single machine watching a 0.7 miner and 0.8 miner would have been enough to alert everyone of the issue before it went as far as it did.
Well if that's the case then they won't be excepting bitcoin. There's just no getting around that.
That's why I'm saying there should be some overview mechanism to alert of these blockchain partitions. In general you can be sure the transaction is safe fairly quickly. If the network is obviously partitioned (as it was in this - so much so it was basically manually fixed) you'd be a fool to accept transactions until it's back to normal.
The problem in this case is that someone handed over $1000 in cash while the network was partitioned without sense checking it. The bigger issue is that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism in place to help them do the checking. Really there should have been big red "bitcoin is not safe to use right now" flags going up.
Personally I think that the place bitcoin could really win would be something like micro donations for content (instead of paywalls / ads). Read an article you like, click a button at the bottom to send over a small amount of money. That feels like the sort of use case it's really well suited for. Payments that can take a while / fail in very exceptional circumstances.
How so? Any double-spend is a risk for anyone receiving BTC, surely? You sell something on an ebay equivalent, someone sends you BTC, you send the goods but later find out there was a fork and double-spend situation, what happens?