I think activated means super clean, so, free of carbon (usually,'carbonaceous crap' covers pretty much everything in the World, which really is a farm-yard outside of a clean room) and free of copper oxide - but, as soon as you wash it with water in air to get the cleaning reactants off, I suspect that you'll form a very thin layer of copper oxide. We are talking about layers which down in the nm scale of thickness, but none the less, it is such layers that can make a big difference to a material, best example perhaps is stainless steel.
I've never worked professionally on copper, but there must be a mountain of info about preparing it for plating and actually doing the plating. One of the things we found was that trying to clean corrosion test specimens using organic solvents was poor at getting off the carbonaceous crap. For ferrous metals, our favourite cleaning technique for test specimens was to use a proprietary cleaner called Decon-90 in an ultrasonic bath, which cleaned very well, but did not etch. It became a standard procedure in the UK nuclear industry.