Correct - but you are relying on the kindness of strangers to get your tx in to a block. and that will only happen if there is spare capacity ( i.e it costs the miner zero to include it ) But bear in mind that the old 'reserved' portion of the block (50K) for free priority tx's is now gone (by default) and that the concept of priority is about to be killed off entirely, I think its fair to say that the idea of free tx's is dead.
There are still miners out there with old versions of the software and running the defaults. Thus, if there's not too much of a backlog, it's quite possible zero fee transactions will get included.
So if zero fee transactions are actually a problem, perhaps it is better that we do have a bit of miner centralization so we have professional miners who actually pay attention to what they are doing instead of a bunch of amateurs not acting in their rational self-interest as was supposed to happen.