I'd like to see it as a flavour. This is also how pretty much every
other noteworthy distribution is doing it (a -bigsmp or -pae flavour, so
there is some precedence.)
You'd be surprised on how many PAE needing servers there are in
enterprises. Having no officially supported kernel images for them is
like saying go standardize on RHEL or SLES instead. I've seen this
happen over issues like this.