• Bitcoin mining requires a previous block, so genesis block was required.
• The first block is special, it's genesis. The reward of it is not spendable.
• There is no mining of the first 1 BTC, the first block got 50 BTC as reward, not 1.
• The difficulty was set at 1. For comparison, right now the difficulty is 55.62 T, that is 55620000000000.
• In that first block, there is this message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
• That block was mined on 3 January 2009.
• 6 days later the second block was mined as the Bitcoin client was released that day

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.