Ernst,
Your observations are mostly correct. The whole point of the new feature is that many times you can clear clogs without using the excessive amounts of ink used by cleaning cycles or bypassing ink limits. We've found that the pattern works quite well on our in-house printers and we've been getting a lot of positive results/feedback from end users as well. It was able to clear clogs in our Epson R1900, Epson R2000, Canon Pro 9000, and HP B8850. One Epson 9600 was so clogged that the magenta and yellow unclog patterns were completely missing. That required a cleaning cycle. So while it's not 100% and stubborn clogs may still need a cleaning cycle, it can save a lot of ink for minor clogs.
As far as it being comparable to printing a profile target, that is certainly not the case! The unclog pattern is specifically designed to pulse the nozzles for each ink on and off across the page in a regular on/off/on/off pattern. Even if you print the full pattern and don't target one specific color, complementary colors are interleaved so that the nozzles still fire off and on in a regular pattern many times. Contrast this to printer profile targets which typically have a regular pattern that changes slowly by hue and doesn't target specific channels, in which case the nozzles are not pulsed but rather used nearly "randomly".
With color management off in the driver, there is a high correlation between the color chosen in the feature and the dots that are placed on the page meaning that color channel isolation is very good in that setup. In the most recent several versions, the feature takes care of black and all gray inks you might have installed. Yes, you need to know how to set up your printer (via the driver or physical switch-out) to use the proper color black, but if you ever use the normal Windows printer driver, that's something you'll know how to do anyway as it is required in normal printing.
Regards,
Mike