Publish and unpublish

I tried to find out exactly what permissions give/deny access to unpublished nodes. All I found was this short statement in a comment (http://drupal.org/node/118322#comment-199593):

When a node is unpublished, then it will be only visible to the author / user number 1.

Is that information accurate? If so, shouldn't it be in the core modules «Getting Started» guides?

I know it's a basic thing, but this kind of easy-to-solve problem (just an information on a user guide) can make a new user loose a lot of time...