Vista: Partitioning and Formatting a New Disk

I just got a new Terabyte hard drive, and I popped it into my Vista Media Center machine (Elrond). When I booted up, it said it recognized the new hardware, and it installed the disk. However, no drive showed up in the Computer folder, so I poked around in the Device Manager. The drive was indeed there, installed and working. I tried rebooting. No effect. Finally, I remembered that last time I had to manually format the drive (I guess the drives don't come pre-formatted to NTFS like they used to), and so (after refreshing my memory with Google) I Opened up Computer Management, went to Storage -> Disk Management, and there was my drive, sitting there labelled "Unallocated". Excellent: all I have to do now is format it, and I'll be on my way. So, I right-clicked on the drive, selected format, and went through the wizard. Then I got this message:

"The operation cannot be completed because the disk is not initialized."

What? Isn't that what I'm trying to do here? Do I have to pull out my Knoppix or GPartEd LiveCD just to get a drive formatted to NTFS for Vista? This is not looking good. Windows Help was worthless when I searched for 'initialize disk'. Back to Google, where I typed in 'vista' plus the error message in quotes, and got a page with a grand total of three (hopefully now with this post it will be four) pages. The first was no help: the guy formatted the drive in XP. The second and third results both contained the solution to the problem. Apparently, we're supposed to all recognize that space to the left of the disk space illustration as right-clickable. Yep, to get a disk initialized, you need to right-click that space and select "Initialize disk" (which writes the partition table, by the way):

After that, it was a simple matter of re-running the format wizard on the drive. Why wasn't there a wizard that said, "You just installed an un-initialized, un-partitioned, un-formatted hard drive, what do you want to do next?" Even a button on the notification that my new hard drive was installed to further configure it would do. There could be appropriate warnings for such possibilities as other operating systems being installed on that disk, or unrecognized filesystems, or other installations.