That is the exact same thing with the A1200. If there is no HD attached it takes for ever to get to that floppy animation screen. It just waits a long time for the HD. If I remember back in the day, a lot of HDs took a long time to sping up, so this delay is part of that.
If you put an HD in there the delay will go away, or as you've found with the 1.3 rom, no delay either as it doesn't even no the IDE port exists.
Miss my old 80 megabyte HD in my 1200. Of course these days I'm not sure I have any data files smaller than 80MB ;-)
Anyway, that sounds like normal operation to me.
