You can take a fx position to hedge the fx risk but that is only part of the problem. Essentially buying shares priced in another currency you have the risk of changes to the fx rate which, as you say, you can protect against by using fx products. However, the other issue is just the cost of the fx in the buy/sell transactions and buying an fx product only adds to the cost. A multi currency account means you can avoid the fx fee of buying/selling stock by simply holding the currency in the account and never converting to/from GBP. If you are regularly trading in another currency, having a multi currency account 1) saves a lot of fx fees but also 2) means you can trade either more profitably or against smaller price movements
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