Any transaction network is going to need some kind of transaction fees. Why? To prevent spam. If transactions can be spammed by bots on the network, you end up with a whole load of pointless data, that will still need to be verified, and reverified for all eternity.
The 1Mb hard limit is designed to create a LIMIT on the amount of transactions on the blockchain per unit time. This is there to create demand/limit supply, and to allow miners to collect fees for securing transactions in the network. The transactions with the highest fees (which are presumably either the largest or most important transactions) will make it into blocks, NOT the free/tiny transactions.
Eventually the block rewards will go to zero, and miners WILL NOT ACCEPT transactions that do not pay fees. Like it or not, this is the long-term prediction for bitcoin mining. As business owners they will be interested in maximizing profits (on average, and in the long run).
If the 1Mb limit (keep in mind 1Mb/block means a max size of 52.6GB/year for the blockchain, which is a ridiculous quantity) is raised, then the potential FUTURE mining revenues, namely transaction fees, are being diluted. Gavin calculates that RIGHT NOW there is only a small cost to blocks being orphaned (
https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/5044482see his back-of-the-envelope calculation). But in the future, when transaction fees are far larger than the block rewards, and bitcoins are at $1000/each, an orphaned block will represent a much larger cost to miners.
A bitcoin fork with 1Mb hard limit will attract more miners, and will thus be more secure than a fork with larger blocks. For this reason it is likely that the 1Mb hard limit (similar to the 21million bitcoin cap) will not be raised in the MAIN fork of bitcoin. The beauty of bitcoin is that it allows the free market to decide. Sure, some altruistic miners could raise their blocksize in a hard fork of bitcoin, and this can be used to sling change around the internet and max out some hard drives. But the main fork will stay at 1MB, will be the most secure network, and will have large transaction fees, that are dwarfed by the monetary value of transactions being much higher than they are today.
TLDR
Any fork with a larger hard block size limit will be less secure, and therefore less valuable, than the fork with the hard limit in place.