joomla/joomla-cms — pull request #2273 by matrikular (2013-10-17 09:35:12+00:00)
Title: Possible Performance and Consistency Issue?

As Jörn Daub has mentioned in the google group three years ago, the behavior he described still exists in Joomla! 2.x and 3.x. You can read about it here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/joomlabugsquad/uws63_tvPPw

Since it still won't break anything and there doesn't seem to be a better solution to this, I've added his proposed getData() method to the JForm class and changed any calls of $this->get('Item') in every view class where $this->get('Form'); and $this->get('Item') were used.

This surely doen't look as good as $this->get('Item') but it solves all problems Jörn mentioned in an unobtrusive way, while any other component would just continue to work just fine.

Tracker item can be found here: