Upgrade fails with "CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ... A table must have at least 1 column]"

While working on CRM-12354, I found that upgrades to upstream/4.3 are failing. The problems were observed upgrading from 4.1.0=>4.3.x and 4.2.0=>4.3.x on the current upstream/master.

Steps to reproduce:

cd /path/to/civicrm
givi checkout upstream/4.3
cd bin
./setup.sh

cd /path/to/civicrm-upgrade-test
./civicrm-upgrade-test databases/4.1.0-setupsh.sql.bz2

I'll attach stack-traces for both upgrades (from 4.1.0 and 4.2.0).

Note: As a baseline, I verified that upgrading 4.2.0=>4.3.0 or 4.2.0=>4.3.beta5 worked in the same setup.