I presume they simply had to put our characters in somewhere ...
And Baldur's Gate is citty as good as any other, better even, since there is a lot of "exotic" people ...
If you want to play non-Baldurian, all you need to do is not picking [Baldurian] choices ... that sounds quite acceptable for me. O_o
I still dont understand why cant we change Race for our hirelings.

Lets us play Githyanki as racist as they trully are!