While I personally do not have the same view on the changes that is happening in PHP 7.0, I completely agree on that any functionality that is removed should be deprecated first.
At the same time, I do not believe this is what ruin the confidence in the language, what does that is the inter-tangled mess of internal function names, the order of parameters across the internal functions, poor support for multibyte charsets (not all of the internal functions support it) and missing vital data types like Decimal.
We are working with Enterprise solutions as well, and we cannot wait until the new version is released due to massive improvements to the internals, both for the speed increases and making it easier to make extensions. This alone should be enough for anyone to update their code base if they are using any of the functionality that is removed.