Question: git clone --no-checkout behavior

I've witnessed the following behavior in both git 1.7.6 and 1.7.10.4.

Assume I have a bare clone, some-repo.git. If I run:
- git clone --shared --no-checkout /path/to/some-repo.git shared-repo
- cd shared-repo
- git status

I see that every file in the repository is _staged_ for deletion. I'm
not surprised every file shows deleted; I'm surprised that the
deletion starts out already staged. A git reset unstages all of the
deletions and I'm good to go. I'm just wondering why they're all
staged in the first place; it seems counter-intuitive.

Can anyone shed some light on this?
Bryan Turner