There was never any indication in the court records of death being a possible penalty, and no other scientists were put to death for their scientific views. I can think of no scientist who ever lost his life for his scientific views. Looking back on the Galileo affair, it's tempting to see it representing a fundamental break in the relations between science and religion, but I don't think it represented anything of the sort. In fact, at the time, it aroused relatively little interest. It was only in later decades and centuries that it came to be seen as a representation of what supposedly happens to scientific pioneers when they dare to try to correct the church's teachings.
Lets move back to the question of evolution.
I can't imagine that many Catholics were waiting to hear the Pope say this any more than they were waiting to hear the Vatican say that the church was wrong in the Galileo case hundreds of years ago. I think it's a footnote because I don't think it changes much. Catholic institutions of higher learning were already teaching evolution. Most educated Catholics I know have believed in evolution, and so it's difficult for me to imagine that this will represent a fundamental change of attitudes even within Catholicism. And outside Catholicism it's simply a curiosity that the leader of one of the worlds major religions would come out in the late 20th Century and feel it necessary to say that evolution is more than a hypothesis.