Comment 12 for bug 771905

Yes, in Maverick it behaved differently. Plymouth used the "text" ubuntu logo instead of the graphical one, but it worked as expected in every other respect. By tweaking manually, you could have the graphical logo.

In Natty, absolutely nothing is displayed most of the time, just a purple screen. However, sometimes (at shutdown, mostly, but not at every shutdown in my case), the graphical logo is shown as normal. This means that plymouth doesn't use the text logo this time, so the bug is probably not the same.

Also, as noted by Psychotron, the guides for solving the Maverick bug don't work for this particular one in Natty.