I suffer from this too. But normally this has been corrected. If you
launch filesystem check, the system should reboot automatically after.
There are two interpretations for "misleading" here.
The original complaint was that the message gave the impression you had to fsck an ext3 system.
But the message is misleading even for ext2, since it doesn't accurately convey what happens if you do or do not press Y. As far as I can tell, if you don't press Y when the message appears during the first boot after an unclean shutdown, it runs e2fsck and reboots anyway.
On the reboot, you'll get the same message. But this time, if you don't press Y, it will find that the partition is now "clean" and continue the boot. If you do, I think it redoes the e2fsck and reboots again (this is from memory, I'm not sure of it).
I'm guessing that the old code drove the message solely from whether the partition was marked unclean or not, so that if it ran fsck and rebooted, you wouldn't get the message at all during the reboot. It looks like the new code separates the state of the partition from how you respond to the message, and will only consider the state of the partition if you don't press Y.
If this is the case, then on the reboot a better message would be "Your system appears to have shut down uncleanly, and it has not yet successfully rebooted although the root filesystem has been checked and now appears clean. Press Y within 5 seconds to force another check/reboot cycle, otherwise this boot will continue."
Is there any point to even showing the message on the reboot if the root partition now shows as clean ?
