$ cat t.tex 
“A quote that \textit{makes a point.”}
$ pandoc -f latex -t html < t.tex 
<p>“</p>
$

As far as I can tell, this is behavior is new with pandoc 1.16, 1.15.0.6 did not show this behavior.

(and just in case: no, that "broken" nesting is not broken, it's what western typography does.)

Just tested with pandoc-1.15.0.6:

$ pandoc -f latex -t html < t.tex 
<p>“A quote that <em>makes a point.”</em></p>