Netgear M4100-D12G - IPV4 Net Interface

Here is the clarification regarding both.

The switches have network parameters (network parms)
this is ip address, subnet and gateway assigned to management interface. This value you see in the web gui under network interface.

The switch also support static routing which allow you to bind ip address to the vlan or port.

By default when you use ezconfig, on previously version netgear did the following

network parameters   

OR

network parms   

On newer firmware, when you use ezconfig, they do the following

vlan database
vlan routing 1
exit
config
interface vlan 1
ip adddress  
exit
ip routing
ip route default 
exit

The different is that first is tied to management vlan. which can be changed using

network mgmt_vlan 

and second is tied to vlan 1 interface. Since the default vlan on the switch is vlan 1, it seems better to have vlan 1 routing interface take the IP address since poeple who buy the switches will sooner or later want to do vlan routing. Since the GUI and other services are accessible by routing interface, it makes it easy to allow use of the switch. If people would consider security then they would plan out ACL and access configuration to limit exposure to the switch.

Another reason is that good admin will not use vlan 1 for management and will reconfigure the management vlan to different vlan. If you configure vlan 1 routing then when you try to configure the IP on network interface in the GUI, it won't let you use the same subnet since it is already existing interface assigned to it on vlan 1. If configure a different address then it sort becomes like multi homed address concept on vlan 1.

I hope that makes more sense.