It should be noted that display lists are deprecated (but for all intents and purposes still there) in the anti-fixed function opengl 3.1+ (and perhaps completely unavailable in open gl es 2.0?). So learning vbos is probably a good idea, and like display lists it also means you aren't passing vertex arrays over the graphics bus on every draw call because the vertex arrays are stored on the graphics card. The advantage of vbos over display lists is you can store static or dynamic data, the disadvantage is you can only store certain kinds of data and not operations, so on some cards display lists are still faster than vbos.
Correct. Personally, I think display lists are so ubiquitous that they aren't going away for decades. I agree that VBOs are the future though. They also have the advantage that the program field of vertex attributes can be dynamically altered. This is important for programmable shading, particularly, when you want to use potentially more than one shader to draw a single object.