To me the most enlightening - and saddest - moment of the init system selection discussion was when Debian leadership quite clearly stated that they are not interested in something being developed in-house, they are just distro which packages somebody's else work.
After so many years, I have finally understood why Debian is constantly rises, hits the plateau, freezes for few years in shock and tumbles back down. They want to be just a distro. They do not lead - they follow. They do not create standards - they adopt them. They do not develop stuff - they just repackage someone else's stuff.
That again was one of the driving factor in picking the systemd over the rest. With systemd, somebody else is doing all the work, while Debian just repackages it.
Is fork a good idea? There is no fork, really. Debian is nothing but an organization, a community. One can clone the repo - but one can't clone the community.
Take out from all of this? There are no reasons to worry. Nothing really changed. Debian is simply following the rest of the distros. I'm simply hopeful that they would manage to integrate the systemd nicely. If not... It's not like it would be the first time Debian released something broken and unusable. (Oh, yes, there might no RC bugs - but the (too old/too new) versions of the software, or their configuration, simply make it useless. And trying to change it - breaks it.) That's why we have the Ubuntu, after all: it's like Debian, but not striving for some committee set goal - instead striving to be just useful.