It is a failure of the web, browser vendors and developers that we are in this situation, but we need to stop advocating for and building examples that use the LocalStorage API's, it is simply not a scalable API and the more we build for it the harder it will be for us to ween ourselves off it.
LocalStorage has poor querying capabilities, terrible performance, small storage in many browsers, crazily inconsistent eventing and a nasty habit of locking. It's saving grace is simple semantics and "browser support".
Client-side and offline web-apps are not a reality with localStorage, and if we keep pushing it, we are never going to be in a situation where we have a compelling offline or client-side story.
We need to bite the bullet, move on and start building compelling apps, examples and demos build around IndexedDB, that is our only future (I am still aggrieved that the web dropped WebSQL, it was simple and familiar) and we need to do this by stopping to support localStorage. Period.
To this effect, I have taken the BackboneJS example in TodoMVC (by Addy Osmani) and added IndexedDB support using the Backbone JS adapter by Julien Genestoux. I quickly removed the LocalStorage interface, and in a couple of lines of config change I had IndexedDB support in.