Yeah, that's probably it. But it would be nice to be able to use them within themes.
The theme area of the board could use a fair amount of expansion - custom template inclusion, additional language files for theme translation, improved security. It won't happen until 2.0 though, so we've got work with what we've got
I'd like default conditionals too
But well, yeah, there's no much to do but stick with what we have for now.