@Chip Bennett -
The new contextual help has no backward compatibility with the current contextual help. None whatsoever. I think this is a terrible decision, and am hopeful that it will be addressed during the beta phase.
So, replying to myself: it looks like backward-compatibility has been restored for contextual help. According to Otto:
The deprecation function call in those was commented out sometime recently, so I think they’re leaving full-conversion until 3.4 or later. So it probably won’t be deprecated in 3.3, just on the verge of deprecation.