isMaster fails for uninitiated replica set

When running isMaster on an uninitiated rs I get:

{u'info': u"can't currently get local.system.replset config from self or any seed (EMPTYUNREACHABLE)", u'ismaster': False, u'ok': 0.0, u'errmsg': u'replSet still trying to initialize'}

The problem is that some drivers (PyMongo at least) run an isMaster command automatically on first connect to try to find the master/primary, ensure the connection is working, etc. So I can't connect to the set to run the initiate command from the driver. Any reason 'ok' can't be true/1.0 for this case?