Referer headers are still sent when you go from one SSL page to another. So, the greatest impact of this development will actually be to force the rest of the web to use SSL, because they need it for analytics.
So unless gAnalytics is going to be deliberately ignoring incoming referer headers in particular circumstances from now on, things should remain the same if your page uses SSL.
I willing to believe however that they actually are going to be deliberately ignoring/discarding the data even when it's available. That would certainly make the EU happy.
The browser decides when to send a referrer, not Google. You can, for instance, tell your browser never to send them, or to send a specific one.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/HTTP_referrer
In HTML5 you can apparently request that a referrer not be sent, but that's a request, not a command.