Was there and bonus for creating a wallet?
Initially the "miner" was the wallet. You installed the wallet and it mined blocks in the background and your wallet balance grew as you solved blocks. All blocks must have 1 transaction that is the coinbase transaction but there is no input for that transaction as the miner is rewarded new coins "minted from nothing". A block doesn't need to contain any additional transactions so mining doesn't stop when there are no pending transactions, it just means the block will consist of only the coinbase.
As an example here is an early block:
https://blockchain.info/block/0000000027c2488e2510d1acf4369787784fa20ee084c258b58d9fbd43802b5eNotice there is only one transaction, the coinbase tx in which the miner received 50 BTC for solving the block and no other transactions involving existing coins.