My team has expressed a desire for this feature, and asked my to try my hand at an implementation.
Dale is taking up this item, marking issue for 2.7 release (haven't added Dale as a developer yet in JIRA, hence issue is assigned to me for now).
I am continuing to work on this. At present, my changes only address the Query tab, not the Explore tab, and have presentation bugs in some corner cases (going close to the end of results, and "prior" to the start of results.
At present, code is checked in that fixes the presentation issue mentioned in my prior comment. In e-mail with Jeen, we have agreed that I will now modify the servlet code to modify the user's query with LIMIT and OFFSET clauses, rather than manually pruning full result set into the subset that is returned in XML, as it currently does. This should be more efficient and future-proof, i.e., be able to take advantage of future improvements in the query engine.
After that is done, the final step to resolve this issue will be to put a similar Next X/Previous X functionality into the Explore view.
Code ready with the servlet modifications described in my last comment. Before checking in, going ahead with a further modification, one that will display "Results X to Y of Z" at the top of each page when only a subset of the full results is being returned.
Final check in which expands this feature to the Explore page as well: revision 11976.