That may be their expectation stylistically, but the first Debian release shipped[1] with bash as the default shell. I’m not aware of them ever having shipped the original Bourne shell. Your claim — that I was responding to - was that on early Linux systems you might only find the Bourne shell but not bash. That simply was not the case.

1 - http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/buzz/m...