From my Fedora 16 laptop:

  $ fgrep DNOTIFY /boot/config-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64 
  CONFIG_DNOTIFY=y

Obviously it's true that dnotify is the old junk and inotify the new hotness. But it hasn't been abandoned, by either the kernel or the distros. Again, they take stuff like this very seriously. Old junk runs. Really, it does.