When I first got into adventure games, dying was always part of the game. Infocom text adventures had plenty of ways to off yourself, and I think it was part of the philosophy of allowing you to do pretty much anything you could think of. At least one game of that era incorporated it into the gameplay so that you had to be sacrificed in order to continue. I think the Sierra games, being right after that era, operated with that same idea. By allowing you to save at any time, having your character be killed wasn't such a tragedy. As the games evolved, death opportunities became less random.
Consider how in the Gabriel Knight games you can die in multiple places in the first game, and in only a few places (mostly towards the end) in games 2 and 3. I think the situations where you could die were appropriate to the situation and seriousness of what was going on. Contrast this to a game like Dark Fall. For me, the game was missing something because your actions never had grave consequences. The atmosphere was forboding, but because it was entirely safe to life and limb it never felt like more than set dressing.
On the other hand, I can respect the LucasArts philosophy and I don't think that their games suffered any for it. Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle have completely different ideologies behind them, and I don't think that death sequences would've been appropriate. The Indiana Jones games do have places where your choices can be fatal, and in this I feel it's perfectly fine.
What I don't appreciate, and this is something that Sierra has been guilty of in a number of games, are dead ends, especially when the consequence of something done or not done relatively early in the game has an impact much further along. That to me is unnecessarily annoying and diminishes the experience.
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