Different jQuery version on admin pages and hook_requirements()

Nice menus has a jQuery version requirement: >='1.8'

...but sometimes we need different jQuery version ( e.g. provided by Drupal core: 1.4 ) on admin pages. This causes that update.php can not run, because this path is admin path and jQuery version is less than 1.8. But usually we don't need nice menus on admin pages. My quick fix is a modified nice_menus_requirements(), but it's not the perfect solution:

/**
 * Implements hook_requirements().
 */
function nice_menus_requirements($phase) {
  $requirements = array();
  if ($phase != 'update') {
    $jquery = drupal_get_library('system', 'jquery');
    if (version_compare($jquery['version'], '1.8', '<')) {
      $requirements['nice_menus'] = array(
        'title' => t('Nice menus'),
        'value' => 'jQuery >=1.8',
        'severity' => REQUIREMENT_ERROR,
      );
    }
  }
}
  return $requirements;
}