I don't know what it was like before, but when I got my first MacBook Pro maybe 2 years ago, the default start page for Safari was blank.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I checked to see my defaults and the Homepage is still apple.com. However, the "opens with" settings are set to Favorites (top of the list, probably the default) which explains why it opens with a blank page. So the change was probably whenever they added the Favorites page feature; most likely to compete with Chrome/Firefox/Opera/etc.

I get some tiles with the most popular websites. So actually the same as the new tab page in Firefox.