Seems to me the console should set autocommit true for its connections to the database.

Suppose you create a configuration for an existing application, and simply re-use the hibernate.properties file already used for testing, debugging, etc. Very likely the properties file has the default, autocommit false. This is not what you want for the Hibernate Console.

Thus either:
Hibernate Console should explicitly set autocommit true, or
Hibernate Console should always explicitly commit its transactions, or
it should be explicitly documented that users should make a hibernate.properties file with autocommit true

yeah probably need to make the default be something like autoclose-session