Well, yes, to a lot of people - both those who lost money in the affair (some people vast amounts), and also to anyone interested in following the development of BTC - if this was theft, how can we prevent repeat incidents to reassure potential Bitcoin buyers; if it was a failure in the technology, what can we do to repair that to make Bitcoin more secure, or if there was some government or official organisations involved, why did they interfere and what're they up to?
Too glib I suppose, I just meant that if the coins are "out there" they're not actually recoverable, are they? If a bunch of sand falls out of my hand on the beach, those grains didn't disappear but I'm never getting them back again. Then there's the very real question of whether it actually is theft. I would argue no, in the sense that downloading a song isn't theft.
You play in dirt, you get dirty. You want an unregulated purely digital currency with irrevocable transactions, you know it's going to sting if you lose some of it.
Edit: Not "does it matter that they are lost", but rather "since they are lost, does it matter where they are".