[hippobravo]

If there is literally no light pollution in your vicinity (like in the middle of northern canada, hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest small town) on a very very clear night it does look something like this.

I've never seen the milky way with that much color, but the amount of stars and the star clouds of the milky way are not that far off.

The title is not just removing light pollution, it is removing most of the atmospheric interference. On clear cold nights you can get something close to this if you're truly in the middle of nowhere. Emphasis on clear and no towns within a few hundred kilometers.

[tanzam75]

I remember the Milky Way looking very ... milky. It's just a dim white haze -- much dimmer than the stars surrounding it.

The reason it doesn't really look like the photos is that we don't have CCDs in our eyes. When things get dim enough, we lose a lot of color perception. (That's why night scenes look practically monochrome.)