It's been found in the current JIRA documentation that the following is unfortunatley not true:

JIRA is pre-packaged with a notification scheme called Default Notification Scheme which, by default, is associated with all newly-created projects.

There has been a docs change request however this feature is still sought after by our customer base.

Please enable the ability to automatically associate a notification scheme with new projects. The same would be good for an arbitrary permission scheme too.