I have my Homepage in Settings set to nothing and New Window and Tabs open with an empty page. In Safari, with similar settings, when I open a new window, the cursor is in the address bar waiting for me to type something. But in Orion, it's not, and I then have to mouse over to it, or use Cmd-L to get to it. It would be nice if it was just there since I can't really do much else until there's somewhere for the browser to go to.
As mentioned above, I expect this to work pretty much like it does in Safari. When I open a new window or tab in Safari, UI focus is on the address bar and I can just start typing. So it's just Cmd-Shift-N then type the address. In Orion, it's Cmd-Shift-N Cmd-L start typing. (And for some reason on the iPad, Cmd-L just doesn't work. It's about 50/50.)