It appears degrees are being converted to radians. There are pi radians / 180 degrees so multiplying by 45 degrees you are left with .785 radians.

I am not on a machine that I can open Maya on atm so I cannot say how you got it displaying rotations in radians but that seems to be what is going on.

From the command line you could try : currentUnit -query -angle to see what is returned as the cirrent default angular units. You can use this same command to change the angular units to deg. Although I am not sure how you are getting the units to be changed in the first place.