FYI, I resolved this issue by upgrading to gettext 0.17 in my packages. Gettext 0.17 is available in Debian, so was easy to do. Still, it seems unfortunate that there aren't any instructions on how to get gettext 0.16 and gnulib to get along.
My attempts to solve it (e.g., overwrite autopoint files with gnulib files) caused unnecessary invocations of autoconf due to file time changes, and I wasn't able to make it work smoothly. Let's hope there won't be any bugs in the gettext 0.17 files that are solved by gnulib, or I'll run into this problem again... /Simon
