Around 5 years ago, when a lowly A+ certified computer shop tech, people paid me crap loads of money to come to their house and setup their already pre-configured computer. Usually, this involved crawling under the desk and plugging color-coordinated cables into the right spots. Then, adjust the cables so they look clean. Finally, boot-up the computer and leave.

Had these customers taken about 90 seconds to look at the instructions and plugged the cables into the right hole (including the parallel and usb printer cables), they would have saved themselves quite a sum of money.

But... The average consumer has a very big aversion to plugging in cables. It doesn't matter if there is no possible way to get the configuration wrong (well... I don't know how many times there have been calls about people getting the keyboard and mouse mixed-up when using the PS2 connectors)

So, for average users, opening the box and not plugging-in any wires (except maybe power) is a good thing.