When I am on mobile net, especially if the connection isn’t all that great the infinite pagination can be frustrating on image searches and the like, especially if I want to load something else concurrently too.
In my opinion the best solution isn’t doing away with pagination, but rather it should be supported by the browser. If I could visit a new site and I would just have to hit a UI button or a hotkey instead of looking for the (usually small) page controls, that would be awesome. Another addition is, that if the scheme would be supported by the browser, than you could start preloading the content of the other pages (hopefully only the textual) once the current is finished so you could search those pages too with the browser’s search feature.
I don’t know, this sounds really utopistic and I think it would require W3C implementing a new standard. Maybe in the next decade…