I thought that if the split does happen all existing coins will be spendable on both sides of the split. Does that not count as 'serious money' on the line?!
That is just like a stock spinoff, it doesn't favour one group of users over another. And the actual forking of the chain (so far only the software has been forked) is some time in the future so everyone will have time to prepare.
For an example of something that would favour one group of users over another, we can take a change of block reward decay schedule. If it decays faster, old users are favoured. If it decays slower, new users and miners are favoured.
An increase in blocksize later on, when fees are majority of mining revenue would favour users over miners.
