You cannot stop a Surprise round from occurring. You can, however, Delay until the first round of the Combat.
So in a word, yes. Yes you can not act in the surprise round.
Delay
By choosing to delay, you take no action and then act normally on whatever initiative count you decide to act. When you delay, you voluntarily reduce your own initiative result for the rest of the combat. When your new, lower initiative count comes up later in the same round, you can act normally. You can specify this new initiative result or just wait until some time later in the round and act then, thus fixing your new initiative count at that point.
You never get back the time you spend waiting to see what’s going to happen. You can’t, however, interrupt anyone else’s action (as you can with a readied action).
Initiative Consequences of Delaying
Your initiative result becomes the count on which you took the delayed action. If you come to your next action and have not yet performed an action, you don’t get to take a delayed action (though you can delay again).
If you take a delayed action in the next round, before your regular turn comes up, your initiative count rises to that new point in the order of battle, and you do not get your regular action that round.
There is nothing stopping you using this as a method to act first in the first round regardless of rolled initiative.
Arguments Against This
There are two things which people might take as proof that you can't 'not act' in the Surprise Round.
The Surprise Round
If some but not all of the combatants are aware of their opponents, a surprise round happens before regular rounds begin. Any combatants aware of the opponents can act in the surprise round, so they roll for initiative. In initiative order (highest to lowest), combatants who started the battle aware of their opponents each take a standard action during the surprise round. You can also take free actions during the surprise round. If no one or everyone is surprised, no surprise round occurs.
This is the first. There is no 'can', so some people, despite textual examples to the contrary, might take it to mean that you must take a standard action in the Surprise Round. There are a lot of standard actions that do not necessarily make foes aware of you, though, so do one of those. Make a Knowledge Check, for example. Or Drink a held potion. Or spend your standard action performing a move action like drawing a weapon, or sneaking. So forth.
There is no magical 'initiative sensor' that tells foes that you are there when initiative is rolled. There can, and should, be combats where multiple rounds occur without foes becoming aware of you.
At the start of a battle, each combatant makes an initiative check.
'It's not a battle unless you're attacking!'. There are no explicit rules for when to roll initiative. Thus, people will argue that it requires an 'attack' to roll initiative, thus shoehorning someone into a surprise round standard action attack any time they declare an attack (and thus ruining a stealthed Full Attack, or a Sniping attempt).
The DMG mentions that moving into initiative is a good way to deal with time sensitive situations, like sneaking past guards or trying to defuse a bomb. The Rules of the Game articles mention something similar. Overland Movement is based on your combat speed, and combat actions like 'hustling' (double move action) and 'sprinting' (full round action).
The game is intended to be executed in rounds, and rolling initiative is just a formalization of that, rather than the abstraction used normally 'I search the corridor' etc. Even using only the sentence above, we come to this;
battle ˈbat(ə)l/
noun: battle; plural noun: battles
1.
a sustained fight between large organized armed forces.
"the battle lasted for several hours"
synonyms: fight, conflict, armed conflict, clash, struggle, skirmish, engagement, affray, fray, encounter, confrontation; More
In usage, 'battle' in modern american english refers to any situation with formalized violence. 'The duration of the hostilities', the 'armed conflict in the blah region'. It is not typically used solely to refer to actual instances of getting shot or stabbed. If you're trying to sneak up on someone, that is probably also part of the combat, and should, or could, be handled in rounds.
It's entirely possible to kill an enemy without the rest of the enemies noticing - illusions, Dominate Person, Death Attack + silence.
At that point, under the argument that 'combat' only starts when enemies notice, at which point you only get a surprise round before they get to respond, you have a situation that is plainly ridiculous - a silent, perfect kill 'triggering combat' and having guards raising the alarm all over the place for no reason, like it's a computer game with shoddy code.
It makes vastly more sense that Initiative can and should be rolled any time it's important to track things in rounds - just as the DMG says you should. 'Getting in position to attack the enemies' sounds like something that should be tracked in rounds, if there is a chance of being spotted, or other people doing other things at the same time.
Otherwise you end up with combat occurring 'off screen' as long as enemies remain unaware, which removes the entire point of the initiative order - to track people's actions and give everyone a turn.
In short, the 'Surprise Round' is a terrible kludge inserted at the last minute without regard for the other rules, exactly the same as the Sniping section in the Hide rules. It should not exist. It raises multiple rules questions, is open-ended in several respects, it contradicts the normal rules for initiative and the verisimilitude of the normal cat-and-mouse game of ninja vs guards.
It should not exist. But if it does exist, there is nothing stopping you simply delaying out of it, except for a misreading of the first line of a condensed set of rules text in the SRD - that can, and should, be ignored in favour of the more complete explanation of Rounds and Combat which exists in the DMG proper.