Here's how I understand it:
All the tiles on your planet are Marked at different levels: usable, salvageable, decent, lesser, almost useless and useless. The usable tiles are available initially. Then, as you unlock the terraforming techs, you gain the ability to terraform one tile of the listed quality or better. There is no guarantee, however, that there will be any salvageable, decent, lesser, or almost useless tiles on your planet. So what is happening in your example is that on your class 15 planet you have no salvageable or decent tiles.
This is the way GalCiv II did it as well, only they let you see the lower quality tiles coded as yellow orange and red, and you were able to improve all of the lower-quality tiles on your planet rather than 1 per tech. The tiles are mapped to match up with the land on the map, so I have found that on higher quality planets there are often no or very few lower-quality tiles because the usable tiles are covering all the land.