I've gotten used to adding extra drives in fstab, myself. I do wish adding permanent secondary drives was a more straightforward process though. I understand the Windows approach of making them instantly accessible has security implications, but I feel like that's something distros could implement as an optional setting.
I think little things like this hinder Linux adoption among end users. The purists may cry foul at this idea, but I think there should be more and better GUIs for system management tasks, so users don't have to use the terminal or muck around editing text files as much.
EDIT: Apparently gnome-disk-utility might be a solution if you're looking for something more straightforward than manually editing fstab. I don't know whether it can do permanent mounts or not though.
EDIT2: Turns out gnome-disk-utility can create fstab entries, but it can't remove them if you've used it to delete a partition.