I think this deal benefits consumers as long as it doesn't go so far as to create a so called paid fast lane for certain web sites at the expense of others. I mean Netflix is such a huge suck of bandwidth they need the speed bost to offer a better product but many other non video intensive sites do not. I think it's a good idea from Netflix's perspective, they had to have been thinking about the issue of content delivery for a long time until now. I guess what I'm saying is if this is just a solution for sites that need to transmit huge amounts of data no one is really losing here.
I don't think we have any evidence that ISPs are going to play nice and limit schemes like this to sites that "need to transmit huge amounts of data." Their history seems to say otherwise.