That's true. But once you get your printer tuned, you don't really need to spend much time extruding in air manually. I just normally warm up the bed and set my nozzle to the bed temperature. Then I load the gcode to pronterface, copy or upload the file to the sdcard while it's warming up, and then click sdprint on pronterface. In that mode, turning the fan on in the start and turning it off in the end is sufficient.
I'm not sure how to tell if it's been pulled except by reading this forum as well as the reprap forum and the irc channel.