You would still be able to do that without a staging area by having `git commit` take roughly the same arguments as `git add`. So instead of running `git add foo bar baz` followed by `git commit`, you'd just write `git commit foo bar baz`, and it'd launch $EDITOR for the commit message.

My understanding is that other distributed version control systems, such as Mercurial or Bazaar, take a similar approach to the above.