No!  If it did that, you would never know what the result was going to look like
when you fill a region with a pattern.  And anyway this is not needed.  If you
want to view the whole pattern, you can hold the left button down with the mouse
over it in the Patterns dialog.  If the pattern is too small, well, that's what
it is going to look like if you use it, so you should probably choose a
different pattern.

(Don't let this response discourage you from making other suggestions, though,
please.  We appreciate your effort.)

If you want to know how it will look like once applied you should click on it to
show the preview.
I want to see the whole pattern in a quick view. Seeing only a small top-left
region of the pattern is not enough and is not practical.

I agree with Daniel that scaling the patern is the better thing to do.

To see why, create a 256x256 pattern, with the top right corner transparent, and
see how usefl the patterns dock is to you.

Bill, you have answered your own counter-argument - to see how the pattern will
look when you fill a region, click the pattern to get a full-size preview.

Since we do this already in the layers & channels docks, I can't imagine that
doing the same for patterns would be particularly complicated.

Scaling down large patterns might give a completely wrong impression of the
pattern, though - IMO in more cases than the current solution.

However, the patterns should probably get indicators showing that not the whole
or a scaled view is displayed - smiliar to the brushes.

Mich, If you don't want the pattern quick view maybe this scaling should be
optional.

My problem is that I can't take a quick look at the patterns since seeing the
top left corner doesn't help.

Mich, If you want to see the "real" size of the pattern you can click on the
pattern anyway.

Just to add one thing to this discussion: 
It is being talked about adding categories to gimp resources. Patterns would 
be one of the resources to benefit from it. 
 
I can all but think that these categories of objects will be managed, from a 
UI point of view, much like palettes are right now - there is a dialog for 
palettes, and a pallete editor dialog which allows for viewing each palette 
contents. 
 
Therefore, not only the pattern preview size could be variable in such 
"pattern category editor dialog", but if they should be scaled for previewing 
could be a property from the category itself. 
 
I apologize for mixing different issues here, but as all the resources dialogs 
will have to be reviewed to deal with the upcoming categories, this have to be 
taken into account in this bug. 
 
 

Adobe Photoshop also scales the patterns to fit in the viewbox.

*** Bug 623531 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

It seems to me that for the 'pattern is too small' case, there is an uncontroversial solution, at least:
Tile the pattern an integer number of times across the available display area.

For the thumbnail display, 'available display area' is dictated by the thumbnail settings of the pattern dialog, of course.
For the popup display, I'd suggest a limit of 40% of the current screen's width+height (for example, on my 1680x1050 screen, the limit could be 672x420), snapped to an integer amount of tiles. So with the example of 672x420 limit, and 32x32 pattern, the actual popup would be 672 x 416 (21 x 13 instances of the pattern.)

(patterns as small as 1x2 or 2x1 are still useful. It helps preview currently if we tile these up to say 32x32 before saving, but of course this means that if we need to edit them, we are required to shrink the canvas, crop the layer, make our edits, and then tile them up to 32x32 again.)

*** Bug 795528 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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