@Skallewag: lol you have to slow down a bit before kneejerk reaction man. The proposed prompt is only triggered for items that don't belong to you (ie: items where your cursor turns red). For regular items everything stays the same. Also, like I said, alt + click suppresses the prompt so you can steal an entire room full of stuff without any confirmation.
@Mjolnir: this is how they did it for some npcs in original sin 1. Problem is you still suffer negative attitude and sometimes fine even if you try to return the items. I'd rather just have a chance to double check if I really want to steal things or not before anything permanent happens.