I think that updating the docs to use render instead of render_to_response is an good change. Many of the CSRF problems that I see new users struggling with are solved simply by switching to render.
Since passing context_instance to render_to_response is deprecated in 1.8. If I understand correctly, that means that users are already going to have to update their code from
return render_to_response('my_template.html',
my_context,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
to
return render(request, 'my_template.html', my_context)
You could argue it's not too much to ask users to change render_to_response(template, context) to render(request=None, template, context) at the same time.
Cheers,
Alasdair