Luckily I do own a GTX 570 SLI setup and I also have the bad habit to make video recorded gameplay/benchmarks for my Youtube channel and I do pay attention to cpu usage, gpu usage, framebuffer usage and all technical info of the hardware, after the benchmark.
I do have seen framebuffer usage reaching its max in various cases on my 570s, but I have never witnessed frame drops or anything of the sort, related to high framebuffer load.
Actually being the PC fanboy I am, I also own some lower end cards (5850s,460 and a 4850) which I also include in my benchmarks. I have found out that even in games that I use the exact same settings as on the 570 system, the 460 for example may hit max framebuffer load, while the 570 will go even higher.
One such example is Battlefield 3 as you mentioned. My GTX 460 hit 1015MB framebuffer load, while my single 570 hit 1200MB framebuffer load, for the exact same part of the game with the same settings.
Both systems were showing 100% gpu load for the whole benchmark, so there shouldn't be any framebuffer shortages there. My best bet is that some games will load as much video information on the graphics board as possible, so they can have faster access. Although this is always preferable, it does not make games unplayable or the performance lackluster, at least not in the cases I have studied.
In any case, since the 1280MB of my 570s is enough for me and since I don't use the cards of my primary system for more than a year, I bet a 1.5GB card would be more than fine until the end of 2012. We need some new consoles in order for developers to start using higher textured/higher spec'ed games anyway. Unfortunately most of them are console ports, that even a mere 460 can play at 60fps.
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