I wondered that too. Perhaps I was too "politically correct". The "total" isn't a count of what's returned but what's available. It might only make sense if you use pagination. 

Also, doing a count first means that if nothing is found (count==0) then there's no point doing the query. 

Having said all that, perhaps it's just silly because pagination is very unlikely to ever be a thing to do in this context. And not having to do a second select if count==0 might be a miniscule "optimization". 

What do you think?