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Most folks who want to deal with this will run with an elilo menu coming up, that gives one a list of images/drives to boot from, and (for us nerds) an option to get an EFI Shell prompt. So, usually, booting is either entirely automatic, for the unwashed masses, or a menu like you see in grub or lilo.

If you go to the shell prompt, then it takes at least a couple of commands to boot - one to select the drive (the "fs1:" command, for example) and one to start up your operating system loader (often done by invoking elilo with a command line option to select a prepared paragraph out of the elilo.conf file in that directory).

I never did mainframes, so don't know what it's like to "dial in the address of the boot drive." I went straight from IBM 1130's to DEC PDP 8's and 11's, then to sundry microprocessors.