Sorry, I'm not entirely sure how to categorize this issue, so forgive me if it's working as designed. There are some pertinent issues dealing with the empty text and the table based empty text message, but none seem to hit on this:

The problem as I see it is that this option, with no indication in the UI, causes a View to be treated as if it has results. I presume this is for the sake of rendering the table, but what this causes is for other handlers to appear that maybe shouldn't because they're supposed to be hidden when there are no results. So the $empty variable used by render functions is getting overloaded to mean "either there are no results or the table is being displayed to contain the empty area".

This has caused problems for us in Commerce before, but I don't know that I realized it was owing to Views' treatment of this variable. Basically, we have area handlers that summarize information from line items or orders in a Views result set, and their render functions assumed the presence of results based on this variable when in fact there were no results, just a table outline.

I suppose this could all be solved through a UI change to the text / description of this form element, but the deeper issue of the variable being schizophrenic would persist. That said, the label / description should probably be updated for Drupal 7 anyways - there is no such thing as "empty text", just an "empty" area handler that actually isn't even called that in the UI - but I suppose it doesn't make sense to label the empty area settings as "No results behavior" either, as it doesn't have anything to do with behavior but display. Oy vey. I guess that can become a child issue if the base issue of an overloaded (and afaik undocumented use of the) variable is confirmed.