I found this fiddle http://jsfiddle.net/thomporter/ANxmv/2/ which does a nifty trick to cause control validation.
Basically it declares a scope member submitted
and sets it true when you click submit. The model error binding use this extra expression to show the error message like
submitted && form.email.$error.required
UPDATE
As pointed out in @Hafez's comment (give him some upvotes!), the Angular 1.3+ solution is simply:
form.$submitted && form.email.$error.required