For the numbers 1-19, more than half of them start with 1. For the numbers 1-199, more than half of them start with one.
Change the examples to 1-299, 1-399, etc, and you'll get percentages of all digits matching Benford's law.
Your method also seems to depend heavily on the choice of starting and ending points. If I chose 1-99, then only 1/10th of the numbers in the interval will start with 1. So why choose 199 and not 99?
I just selected end points to illustrate the concept. I think this place is getting a little too literal. :)
I think it seems "counter-intuitive" to some because they are not used to thinking of numbers and counting as being related to exponents and bases.
This may seem more intuitive to those of us that work with computers all day since we are intimately familiar with how to count in a handful of different bases (base-2, base-10, base-16 etc).
1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 100
I think he most likely meant to exclude 1 and 100, but I don't know.