Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Feature (I guess)

What is the current behavior?

$onChanges isn't called on the initialization of the component.

What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?

The motivation is to match the behavior of Angular 2. In A2, ngOnChanges is called on the initialization of the component too. And the change object includes the isFirstChange method, which in this case returns true.

Other information (e.g. stacktraces, related issues, suggestions how to fix)

A plunk that shows how ngOnChanges works in Angular 2: http://plnkr.co/edit/kIf8QgrFxtENzvr6V5TZ?p=preview