Every time I enter a house with an unlocked door I'm always offered a beer.

Sorry, but I've had those auto-notify options on other devices, they annoy me. Likewise you don't want to be on one network and then have it auto-connect to another midstream (literally), it just doesn't make for a quality experience. Obviously it needs to not do it if already connected, better signal strength or not.

As long as I can disable any auto-notify feature, I'll be fine.

Proof of consent aside, automatically connecting to open wifi is just bad for security. It's not too hard to set up what appears to be free internet, then record everything that goes through it, or a more advanced man-in-the-middle attack.

A notification (though annoying for some) would be useful if the device is in my hand. I certainly wouldn't want it to tell me there's a network available while it's in my pocket.

If you ever use any open wifi, then its really OK to use every wifi. The difference in security is basically nil. If you are really worried about it, you should never use any open wifi, and WEP or WPA wifi (crackable in minutes), and really only use WPA2 wifi with a certificate (a big pain in the butt).

A much better way to be secure is to make sure you are using SSL/TLS/HTTPS for things that you are worried about. Those are very very difficult to crack. We are trying to make this kind of security information easier to understand here:

http://shareyourwifi.org