I'm not sure what you mean by "have we got it back".
But the behavior is the same for 10.1 and 10.2. Anything executing in the background has a status bar in the bottom right of the application with a message indicating something is executing. If you click that bar, it'll open up the Results window to that executing tool where you can read the messages.
If you're referring to the point that sometimes the bar doesnt appear when you launch a tool: Yes, this is something I've heard of, but this behavior hasn't been "fixed". We've investigated it, but can't pin down why it happens for some people and not others. If you start background processing from Geoprocessing menu > Options > Enabled BG > OK - the bar should be at the bottom. I've never once seen/heard of that method not displaying the bar at the bottom.
So in short, we changed the message style in the bottom right bar between 10 and 10.1. But 10.1 and 10.2 have the same behavior.
Note: I work at Esri on the Geoprocessing Team.