Using major version would cause older daemons to reject those
blocks as they fail to deserialize blocks with a major version
which is not 1. There is no such restriction on the minor
version, so switching allows older daemons to coexist with
newer ones till the actual fork date, when most will hopefully
have updated already.
Also, for the same reason, we consider a vote for 0 to be a
vote for 1, since older daemons set minor version to 0.
This allows knowing the hard fork a block must obey in order to be
added to the blockchain. The previous semantics would use that new
block's version vote to determine this hard fork, which made it
impossible to use the rules to validate transactions entering the
tx pool (and made it impossible to validate a block before adding
it to the blockchain).