Pager should unprotect it's $maxElement counter

So, chx and I have been working on adding pager support to EntityFieldQuery (#885014: Add pager and tablesort to EntityFieldQuery).
We've decided to skip the sql pager in order to make the code reusable for non-sql field storage.
However, we need to access (and modify) PagerDefault::$maxElement in order not to overlap with any existing (non-EFQ) pagers on the page.
That causes a fatal error because $maxElement is protected. I want to make it public. Any objections / downsides I'm not thinking of?