I don't remember there being a 7.x-1.x-dev version. I think I was working on porting the 6 version but this dev version looks like it works pretty well - at least for the basic use case of simple string replacement
The Path Auto patch doesn't address EXISTING nodes, only ones created/saved/updated from the point at which Path Auto has this Patch Auto Persist functionality merged into it.
I just went around this and in f4ff0d40 I disable path auto alias generation if a custom alias is set. I only do this if !isset($node->path['pathauto']) so later if path auto adds this functionality it will use that instead.