It doesn't, your front node would have begun pulling the chain after a new block was observed on the network and relayed to it by one of its external peers.
I was able to repeat this "hang" and watch what happened by looking at my node and at blockchain.info. My node remained hung for more than 24 minutes between blocks, but eventually a new block appeared on blockchain.info and within a few seconds appeared at my node. So, as you suggested the node did begin pulling the chain at that time.
In summary, I would call this situation a "start-up performance non-feature" rather than a "bug", since a few extra minutes on occasions when starting a node isn't really important because nodes shouldn't be going up or down frequently.