Yes, they were making it a point to say that you can disable updates. I was rather wondering whether Steam would be still running in the background, one way or the other, since even the first edition of Skyrim was already using Steam. I had bought a CD-ROM only to discover that it didn't actually contained the game - it only contained a small Steam installer that then forced me to download everything. Which was kind if beside the point of having a CD-ROM so that you would not have to download!
Although admittedly for me this discussion is purely academic since my PC cannot even start to run Skyrim SE.