Pagination is in same boat as dynamic scaffolding, both will be extracted into plugins by Rails 2.0. Just to show my continuing love of the Core team crushing the promising dreams of much loved features, I decided to do the work for you.
In #7700, dynamic scaffolding was moved into a separate plugin and deprecated in core. Same thing here. Move pagination to its own plugin, users see the deprecation notice, install the plugin, and it goes away.
This plugin also includes some simple updates from the following tickets.
* http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/4113
* http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/4116
* http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/7133