Except that Dropbox has now discontinued their public folders in exchange for there get link everywhere (which requires you to click add to dropbox or a download button rather than direct access).
Yes - all that means is that now you can move a file into anywhere in your Dropbox, right-click it, and click (in the Nautilus plugin) "Share Link" and get a publicly available link.
The only thing that the Public folder did differently was that it did the equivalent of "Share Link" for every file in it, and also had a public index of files in the folder.