True, but you have to be careful though, even in face selection, if you use "deselect" (even in face mode) you will still deselect the vertices.  I saw this problem when using face selection, so switched to vertice selection.  It was not obvious, but I was getting the same result.

So in the sample above, if I selected the bottom 2 faces, it is equivalent to the example.  And when I deselect it does the same.