WorldExplorer, great question. I first off let me welcome you to the community. Feel free to continue to ask questions or voice your option with any fears, we are a friendly bunch.
Talents and skills are different entirely. No one starts with a talent but do have skills to enhance as they play like most games. Depending on your character and play style skills rise and fall over time. Use them, they improve. Don't use them they start to go down. Talents on the other hand are completely different
Very little is known about the specifics of talents at this time but I can pass along what I know. First off, Talents are tied to a lifetime in which you must discover your talent and learn to harness it/use it before you die since it will go back into the overall talent pool for the server after death. This talent pool is 5% of players per server at any given time will have a talent, now whether they discover it or not is another story, if not, then it will recycle back into the pool and redistributed to another. There can be only One talent per lifetime for a character if they are in he lucky 5% and can unlock it. Perhaps it is a talent you want to say No to (which is possible I guess) and again it will be redistributed by the pool. Whether they enhance a given skill or offer a different enhanced skill altogether is unknown however personally I hope it is the latter.
It was stated by Caspian that talents will have both a positive and negative aspect and they may not be all they are cracked up to be. It would be entirely possible that the negative aspect is too great and you pass on the talent. An general example (just making this up as an example) take a animal trainer that gets a talent. Say they can now start to talk to the animals as a way to train them. Others may see this and find it very odd behavior and want nothing to do with the individual or a store may stop selling to them entirely. You must weigh the negatives with the positives.
There is a lot we just don't know about talents. From my understanding they will Not be in at launch but will be introduced soon after but no one will really know when. Since there will be no server down times for patches they will just roll in under the radar until one discovers them which is a cool way of introducing them into the world. My perspective is since only 5% of players will gain a talent and that talent only lasts for a single lifetime (less if you discover it late in life and have a hard time mastering it) I would not worry much about them. If you get one cool, if not (which is more likely) live life the best you can with that you have and not worry too much about what you don't have.