It depends a bit on where we want to go with these. 1.7.1 and 1.8.1 were fixes for things that arguably shouldn't have made it into 1.7 and 1.8 in the first place. I could see us moving to a scheme where we did more regular bugfix releases though; e.g. 1.9.1 a month after 1.9, and 1.9.2 a month before 1.10. At that point it would probably make sense to try to include a bit more in those releases.
Personally I don't feel the need for timed stable releases (though, again, it's not something I would actively oppose to). My point of view is that somebody using 1.x should be able to switch to 1.x.y with a rather strong trust that that's not going to break their application (while moving to 1.x+1 might require some more review and testing). Within this boundary every patch that makes the user's life easier should be acceptable.