Keep paging backward compatible with angular 1.2.x

At the moment ui-grid is dependent on angular 1.2.16 for it's core and existing RC14 features. I noticed you uses the $watchGroup(['grid.options.totalItems', 'grid.options.pagingPageSize'] inside the uiGridPager directive. Is that absolutely necessary ? It could be replaced with $watch('grid.options.totalItems + grid.options.pagingPageSize'to achieve the same thing and stay compatible with the 1.2.x.