[racket] Does the ffi/unsafe/objc require racket/gui/base to do things?

I'm playing with the Objective C bindings, and I'm encountering a
behavior that I don't understand yet.  Given the following program:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
#lang racket/base
(require ffi/unsafe/objc
         ffi/unsafe)
(import-class NSAutoreleasePool)
(define pool (tell (tell NSAutoreleasePool alloc) init))
pool
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;


when I run this under DrRacket, I see values that do look ok.
However, when I run this under plain console-based racket, I get #f
back from everything.

If I force a graphical context by adding in a require to
racket/gui/base, then the program above works as expected even in
console Racket.  But is this supposed to happen this way?