It seems really odd to me that name servers would ever be specified as names that needed resolved before they could be used to resolve names...

This is used in the testing/using of authoritative and/or delegated nameservers which are usually specified by name rather than by address (so that they may be rotated, migrated, etc. by the hoster without affecting the delegation). So long as you have bootstrapped correctly by having an initial resolver to do the lookups of the nameserver names it is a handy feature.