Comment 42 for bug 761830

Jim, I agree that having grub switch the VT rather than the program needing same is rather cart-before-horse-ish. It does have the advantage of happening very early in the boot process, however (even before the kernel/initrd are loaded), and I suspect the rationale for doing things this way is keen on that chronology, along with the desire for a graphically "seamless" boot process.

For my part, I wouldn't fault grub for doing the switch, if Ubuntu hadn't utterly failed to account for non-X installs when they wrote the logic in /etc/grub.d/10_linux.