That's a hypothesis, and one which is especially promoted by the 'wide open blocksize' crowd.
Satoshi didn't say why he did it in the commit comments as I recall, and I've not heard any credible person say that he explained it to them as it being due to DDoS concerns or anything else.
A perfectly viable hypothesis is that he knew that some other mechanism besides gross opening the blocksize would eventually be required due to scaling issues, and he thought that this setting would give enough headroom for Bitcoin to grow to a decent size before running into problems.
I like to think that, like myself, sidechains at least occurred to Satoshi early on in his ruminations about scaling modes. Likely we'll never know though. For my part I imagined the name 'child chains', but whatever. Same diff. They are just a logical sub-set of the Bitcoin solution one way or another.
Surprised you're evidently not familiar with this quote:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
Looks to me like he was just smoothing over some ruffled feathers since someone happened to notice his 1MB protocol setting. Clever guy was the ol' Satosh.
Looked like a straight-forward, casual discussion to me. And Satoshi was always pretty direct about technical matters.