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There's no need to force a special interaction. They usually have to interact with a menu regardless. You can know the controller then.

I had the impression this was on Sony's technical requirements list, so people have no choice.

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You're right about the reqs. A lot of the menu screen behaviors were traditions borrowed from arcade games and big box demo kiosks. The idea is that your game must do "something" if idle for a long period of time without someone officially "starting" it.

I assume the thinking is that there's a non-zero chance that the first input event will pop up some kind of user selection thingy. And that it's mildly cleaner to have this happen in response to a prompt such as PRESS <NAME OF BUTTON> TO START, where the user is clearly being directed to press a button to start, than it would be to be have it happen in response to them pressing (say) the down button when hoping to get to the second option of the apparently useable menu they'd just been presented with.

As a bonus, this does also simplify handling any user-specific options that may affect the display of the initial menu.

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