I might just be an idiot, but in case anyone else made the same mistake, I thought I'd toss this out there:  


From wowinsider:
Q: "Whatever happened to being able to confirm/save talent specs before finishing them? I know this was a nice feature I was looking forward to in 3.1?"

A: This is in patch 3.1, but you need to turn the feature on. It's off by default. Go into your main menu, open up the Interface menu, then click Display. The option for it should be in that panel.





So, yeah,  I was so excited for this change, and quite pissed that it didn't seem to be working.  Guess I should have read the patch notes.  Oh well, I'll have a chance to try it out tonight, since we're getting our talent points refunded again.