Surely the larger % (if greater than 50%) must be considered the "main chain". If i were to boot up a pre-hard-fork bitcoin instance now under you logic that might be the only node in the world running *pure* bitcoin, with the 99.99% of us on the current chain simply using an "alt-coin".
Your point largely still stands though...
But, it is never going to happen because all these people that come up with bright ideas of how to change Bitcoin never actually do it. They just sit and post about it over and over. Those that actually do something go create an alt coin with a totally new chain. Creating an alt as a blockchain branch has a real issue: all of us that own pre branch coins now own coins on both branches and given any value to the alt we can all dump our alt coins and crash their alt coin market and use the proceeds to buy more real Bitcoins.