I've think I heard the rumours a while ago, but it's only the last couple of days whil writing about australopithecine landscapes that I've actually clicked - the re-arrangement of the Plio-Pleistocene boundary last summer (from 1.8 million years ago to 2.6 million years ago) has ensured that the australopithecines are now almost entirely Pleistocene species.
The genus Paranthropus, in particular, barely appears before the Pleistocene boundary under the new rules. Suddenly, almost every time I've used the term "Late Pliocene" in my literature review needs to be revised to "Early Pleistocene"....
Apart from this little irritation, though, I'm not sure what other impacts the change will have - except in making textbooks out of date, which, frankly, happens fairly often in palaeoanthropology as a result of fossil finds anyway. At the same time, I can completely understand that palaeoanthropologists, and palaeontologists for that matter, are angry about not being consulted on this change - it's impact will not only be felt by the geologists who define blocks of geological time, and the decision probably shouldn't have been taken by one group of stakeholders in isolation from others.
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The statement by the International Union of Geological Sciences re-defining the Pleistocene can be found here:
http://bit.ly/cqWHgn
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