Additional discussion (August, 2008):

The removal of this conversion for current string literals would affect overload resolution for existing programs. For example,

    struct S {
        S(const char*);
    };
    int f(char *);
    int f(X);
    int i = f("hello");

If the conversion were removed, the result would be a quiet change in behavior. Another alternative to consider would be a required diagnostic (without making the program ill-formed).