Starting magic is a feature, while combat machines for heroes with a level 1 character are a bug. In RoE, all heroes arrived at the tavern with troops (like in Heroes 2), then in AB, they left the army only for the heroes at the beginning of the week, and the rest were given level 1 units. But they forgot to take away the machines from the machinists.

They also forgot to recalculate movement points, so a hero with 1 centaur could have 1700 movement points at the start, or 1500, depending on whether they initially had dwarves. But this was fixed in HD.