What's dishonest about it? I'm trying to understand the issues that you mean, and the need to configure before getting to work is what I understood you to mean as broken. I'm not talking about misconfiguration; that's different. You emphasized that if you couldn't get straight to work then it was broken. When I can't get straight to work, it's because I need to configure something. I'm using "configure" to mean any sort of maintenance on the machine itself that doesn't involve "real work".
If that's not it, then I've no clue anymore about what you mean as broken.