All the newer Volkswagens, even my '04 Passat, come from the factory in "sleep mode". The CAN is dormant, as are many other functions, and they need to be turned on. This is done primarily to prevent battery drainage until the car is sold and [presumably] in daily use.
The VAG-COM will allow you to put the car back to sleep, which is something I would recommend if you know the car is not going to be driven for over a month or so.
The seat controller has adaptive learning, just like most anything else on the car, and once it is awake, it needs to know where the ends of its positions are. Otherwise the memory will not work. The auto up/down functions on the windows, sunroof, and even some other things need to be enabled during PDI too. This is common, most manufacturers are like this, it isn't just Volkswagen. Just so happens that many techs are too lazy or too dumb to go through the PDI procedure and be sure and get everything working the way it is supposed to. And also, the salesperson is supposed to go over all of those features at delivery, to triple check to make sure everything is working as designed.
Some other things that sometimes do not get checked: spare tire pressure (all 5 tires are overinflated and need to be adjusted, the spare often gets skipped), proper test drive (for Volkswagen I think it is 2 miles), moveable headlight initialization and aim check, washer fluid top-off, DTC memory check/purge, damage to undercarriage (from sloppy transports), and making sure the radio station presets are at least set to some stations and working normally.