Maybe, maybe not. It's been brought up many times and there are a lot of people on both sides of that fence and no official word.
Now, to improve on your 'facts'... mIRC is still the most popular IRC client for Windows users regardless of not having emoticons, so people aren't choosing other clients just to have emoticons. Also, IM and IRC are really two different things and should not be compared in such ways. They have different uses and abilities and protocols and so on. Just because they are both used to chat doesn't make them the same. It's like comparing apples and oranges... even though they are a similar shape and size, they aren't the same thing.
I think you'll find the majority of IRC users really could care less about emoticons. Most wouldn't care if they were added, but at the same time, most wouldn't care if they weren't. Most of the people requesting them are those who basically grew up on AIM rather than IRC and therefore expect IRC to change to be like AIM. That just isn't going to happen. Minor things like emoticons can be added, but IRC will never be IM.
Besides, with unicode coming, you have access to the unicode smileys that you can use if you really want and if you don't want to "type" those smileys, it's easy enough to use a script to replace ascii smileys with unicode smileys.
