And it can be extremely confusing for new users. Let's say the user creates a new document, switches to the PartDesign workbench, creates a sketch and selects it from the Tasks panel. Then he enters the sketch edit mode, and zooms out the view to create his moderately large sketch. Once he closes the sketch, the 3D view is restored to the original view, which is zoomed extremely close. The result is that the just completed sketch disappears from view. That's what I call a big usability issue.
In Sketchup, creating a new document refers to a document template that you set as default (IIRC). There are metric/imperial architectural templates, and metric/imperial engineering templates. The latter obviously starts with a smaller zoom.