BryceM,
Come on. First priority is to get passengers and crew to safety. 'Notify ATC'? give me a break.
Well, how else are the airport fire services going to know about your problem? If you hadn't yet made the decision to evacuate, a quick PAN call to ATC might save lives if you did catch on fire later on. If you were evacuating, a 5-sec MAYDAY would be useful, too.
This incident seems to me to be in the grand tradition of failed communication between the cabin and the flight deck, with the result that the pilots were unaware of the seriousness of the situation (ie that the fumes were serious enough to warrant an evacuation, rather than return to stand).
Going by the above personal account, it appears that there was plenty of communication going on, including a PA by the Captain. During the return to stand, information was received that led to an evacuation command.
The point of this sort of incident is not that it ended reasonably well, but that the same actions would have had a very poor outcome if there had been fire as well as fumes. Several minutes of delay, poor communications and indecision could have resulted in a body count.
If there *had* been a fire in the cabin, I'm sure an evacuation would have been initiated very quickly indeed, possibly independently by the cabin crew. I don't think their desire to remain on board a burning aircraft is any greater than that of the passengers? As (by all indications) there wasn't, there was some thinking time available.
Whenever an evacuation is commanded, you know there is a high risk of serious injuries, even deaths occurring. This has to be balanced against against your perception of how bad the situation might become on board. For smoke/fumes that appears to be coming from the AC, switching off packs/bleeds/engines/apu might be all you need to do to stabilise the situation. If it doesn't work you can boot everyone off but always in the back of your mind are the non-reversible and potentially injurous qualities of evacuation procedures. Believe me, if we jumped out of aircraft every time someone smelt something funny, we'd never get airborne.