Personally I found the starting point a 50 BTC block reward (as opposed to say 64) to be more "strange" - am guessing the only reason for this particular number was to try and "appeal" to non-nerds (not that there probably are any that would be mining BTC).
Well, they outnumber us by about an order of magnitude so preferring 50 and 25 versus 64 and 32 is obvious.
Like all aspects of Bitcoins initial design, it was decided by Satoshi.
I wanted something that would be not too low if it was very popular and not too high if it wasn't.
There are some people who think that Facebook ($FB) is a better stock than Alcoa ($AA) because a share of Facebook trades at $25 versus $9 for Alcoa. These same people don't generally trade themselves so a basic understanding of stock prices isn't necessary for them.
I personally didn't appreciate this until Bitcoin hit parity and suddenly instead of Bitcoin being these fake bits it was now "worth more than a dollar, so it must be somehow legit".
The benefit of this decision helped bitcoin (in the court of public opinion) when it was critically needed. What many sites are doing is displaying the amount of bitcoins in one field and right next to it is that amount's value in dollars. This will ease the concern when we start seeing things priced in mBTCs -- where at one site you are paying 130 millibits for an item and at the next one the price is listed as 0.137 BTC.
