If you can get it quick enough you can usually get away with typing go at the ok prompt and everything will be okay. Otherwise turn the key to secure so "breaks" on the serial console or unplugging the keyboard don't cause the system to freeze up.
If you realize that this is the result of 35 years of continuous development across a wide range of compute platforms, there's a certain sense to it. It's internally consistent with its development history. Not that it doesn't suck.
39 ms