I don’t think this is a problem in either Maven or Surefire plug-in. Else the surefire is behaving differently. It looks like now, when Surefire forks the JVM, will not take all the system properties from the parent JVM.
That’s why you should pass whatever system properties you want for the tests, using argLine.
So, both these should work
mvn2.1 -Dsystem.test.property=test test -DforkMode=never
or
mvn2.1 test -DargLine="-Dsystem.test.property=test"