I think that's a matter of the requirements for your Views. As you said, that approach gives you the flexibility of adding functionality to your View
class and having it instantly available in all your Views.
However, as the focus in the View is usually put in maximizing the XAML and minimizing the code-behind (a good example for this are behaviors), I think your common base View
class approach might somehow move you in the other direction. Whatever you'd put into that class, try to achieve it through XAML and behaviors.