Interesting - normally, "wipe data" forces a direct boot to recovery (until the recovery successfully wipes data and resets the flag) and disallows access to the bootloader menu - the classic brick situation.
What happens when "someone" tries to boot Android from the bootloader menu, and what does the recovery do?
I used the Wipe Data option more than once and honestly it always worked as intended (e.g when i was testing a CWM Recovery bug which corrupted my data/media partition twice), once you press Wipe Data, it boots to recovery (like you also said) and start to format data/media (and obviously it manages to repair a corrupted partition too, considering that it worked for me when the partition has been corrupted by CWM Recovery). Obviously i always used stock recovery which is compatible with the bootloader and imo this is where most users go wrong, they don't check the bootloader and the recovery are compatible.
As for the question, you mean booting to Android from the bootloader menu with the stock recovery or a custom one? With the stock recovery iirc it's like some kind of "wipe cache&dalvik" and maybe that's why even Asus customer care calls it " Coldboot", but honestly i don't remember if the device boots to recovery before starting Android.