http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-...
Even though the other stakeholders will certainly be able to make their preferences known to the miners, any effect the other stakeholders will have on the success or failure of the fork will be through the miners, which IMHO makes my statement "it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet" correct, at least for a sufficiently narrow definition of "vote".
Even when we consider the situation more broadly, none of the other stakeholders have (as far as I can tell) as much at stake as the miners. The miners for example might be hoping that if the 1-meg limit remains in place, transaction fees will become a significant fraction of mining rewards, which would increase the total income of mining (income being essentially the built-in rewards, which are not affected by the fork plus the transaction fees). Holders of large positions in Bitcoin on the other hand -- what is their reason for preferring one fork or the other? Ditto merchants who accept a lot of Bitcoin transactions.
ADDED. As far as I can tell, the designers Bitcoin XT sofware have done what they can to minimize the distruptiveness of the fork on the lives of the other stakeholders -- by, e.g., refraining from doing anything to affect anyone but the miners till 2 weeks after a full 75% of miners (or 75% of hashing power -- not sure which) are running the XT software.
ADDED. Yes, I realize that any additional income gained by the miners will be paid by Bitcoin senders (e.g., people using Bitcoin to pay for things), so in that sense Bitcoin senders have just as much at stake as the miners do, but transaction fees will always be a very small fraction of the costs (considered collectively) of the senders of Bitcoin, so this is another instance of the very common situation where a large number of people are affected in some very small way by some policy decision whereas a smaller number of people are affected in a more significant and material way, and we know (from experience with democratic governments) that what usually happens in that situation is that the smaller group (whose interests are "concentrated") has a much larger influence on the decision than the larger group (whose interests are "diffuse").
