I just revisited [1] and found out that it isn't correct. The kernel only exports foo=bar pairs to init (and only if it doesn't know the left hand side, for instance, it doesn't export root=). Statements without = are not exported.
The reason this worked is that mkinitcpio used 'export' to export 'verbose=y' in this case. This is not true anymore for 0.6.9 (and future releases, as 0.6.9 has a bug related to this change).
I guess [1] should be reverted, and the initscripts should be search for more such checks.
[1] http://projects.archlinux.org/initscripts.git/commit/?id=3d9fbd69fbab72ccdbd...