There are so many other platforms that this will never be possible on. Don't like something in Windows, tough. Don't like something in OS X, tough. Don't like something in Linux, xBSD, etc? Fork or go home.
I'm excited to see what happens next and if it will be folded back into Debian in the future.
It's sad to see an end to this era - and it's an end that's been brought not by Dr Jackson (who's been part of Debian for decades) but by SystemD abusing the spirit of openness, following the letter of open source but not the spirit of open standards, of allowing a diversity of solutions to blossom and letting users mix and match whatever best suits their needs.
There will be a fork; there are enough people who care about good engineering not to let this lie (unless they all turn to FreeBSD). But it's sad that it's come to this, and it shouldn't have happened this way.
Some people don't have a problem with that, some do. In the end it's not about choosing an init system; indeed, I think a lot of the arguments and opposition to systemd would go away if systemd were interchangeable with any other init. But that's not the case; if your distro of choice has decided to go with systemd, then you're running systemd or you're not booting (yes, there are shims in Debian right now but they exist only for migration purposes).
Highly recommend to read this excellent mail by Russ Allbery on portability and Debian's history:
Alternative init systems are a very old idea implemented over and over for decades.
The "innovation" of systemd is product tying it deeply to Gnome. Nobody is willing to kick out Gnome, so they can make everyone else do whatever they want. Including, say, making it impossible to run any other init system.
By analogy it would be like product tying emacs into python, such that you can't install or run vi if you have python installed at the upstream level, because the default location for python temp files is now /usr/bin/vi. Well, I guess you could stop shipping python, or cave in and remove vi. This is the "innovation" that is new in systemd. Merely being an advanced init is really old stuff.
If three years from now, everything from Firefox to GNU tar depends on systemd, then your open-source Linux is in the same boat.
[Edit: Just to be clear, I don't expect that to happen. I'm just pointing out why people get upset when systemd encroaches on very large numbers of system components.]