Well, lets step back a little bit and explain your requirement. Resources typically should not be identified by query parameter values, they should are addressed by a request URI. So I'm not sure preserving parameters through the redirect is ideal here, honestly (sending the site_preference parameter through the redirect is definitely not ideal, after it's already stored in the cookie).
To your second point: why aren't cookies good enough? Do you really want to rely on a query parameter to be present on every request to force the mobile site? Wouldn't you have to rewrite each URL generated by your view templates with site_preference=mobile then?
Keith
Keith Donald
Core Spring Development Team