[Cogito]

In addition to the other replies, it is also standard for rockets to 'clear the pad' as soon as possible, to avoid damaging the ground support equipment as much as possible.

The amount of kick to the side is almost certainly due to the offset engine, but they would definitely design the flight path (with that in mind) to clear the pad as fast as reasonable as well.

[m4rtink]

Yep, pretty much every rocket is much much cheaper than the often one-off launch infrastructure.

From what i remeber some Soviet rockets had after a string of pad destroing failures any abort commands disablee for the first 30 seconds of flight - regardless of what happens, it must not hit the pad, or Barmin (the chief designer of most Soviet launch complexes) will be angry and you don't want that.