To paraphrase @peff:

You can get both size and type from a packed object reasonably cheaply.
If you have:

* An object that is not a delta; both type and size are available in the
  packfile header.
* An object that is a delta. The packfile type will be OBJ_*_DELTA, and
  you have to resolve back to the base to find the real type. That means
  potentially a lot of packfile index lookups, but each one is
  relatively cheap. For the size, you inflate the first few bytes of the
  delta, whose header will tell you the resulting size of applying the
  delta to the base.

For simplicity, we just decompress the whole delta for now.