MrPhil, I actually expect that some confusions may happen no matter how well we explain it. Which is why the wording and even formatting of the announcement, the wiki pages, and other details. If they're not enough, I think that, sure, we can continue to refer to it as 1.0.x, as additional care (although I think I've seen references meant to 1.1.x written as 1.0.x, too, I'm afraid). I have actually intently
postponed this announcement, the start of the 1.0.x end of life timeline, to long after 2.0 release, for the same reason. There were proposals to start making this step then or around that time, but IMHO that would have likely been much more confusing: back then people were understandably wondering anyway what changes for older versions, and there were also some problems (i.e. there was an issue on the mod site accepting submissions) that we have fixed meanwhile. I think the probability of confusions between
the old 1.0.x and
1.1.x would have been much higher, than today.
In addition, meanwhile we have also released patches to the SMF community
for all 3 versions in current development support. (1.0.22, 1.1.16, 2.0.2)
IMHO, part of the cause of confusion is that people may have forgotten 1.0.x even exists, if they knew it at all, for years. That's a fact which makes quite unavoidable a number of confusions. Strangely enough, it means that the precise fact that it's not popularized at all for a long time, is not helping.

(it's not even mentioned on the downloads page for years, although we're
always continued to patch it too, and it
is present on
the patches page.)
Perhaps it would actually help if all versions, 1.0.x, 1.1.x, and 2.0.x, are mentioned on the main downloads page, at least until December 2012, the actual EOL of 1.0.x.