Not had time to test this extensively, but managed to reproduce this several times this morning.
I’m working with templates saved as flat files, with the latest changes to the templates currently residing in the files.
If I then create a new template and duplicate an existing template on the system, it doesn’t pickup the latest changes from the file and instead just takes the DB copy.
Using 2.1.1 build 20101020.
Thanks
EDIT: Looking again I can see this is already addressed in this thread:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/169212/
Feel free to delete this post as it’s kinda pointless 😊 Would love it if this functionality changed in the future though, doesn’t seem logical to me.