That's almost certainly what's being done in the OP's examples. For just about every major commercial font there's a freeware equivalent that's nigh-indistinguishable. Much of what you're paying for in a commercial font is the kerning and hinting information.
Apologies for the necromancy, but the hinting and kerning information is what makes a font look good. On display faces at larger point sizes you can work around it by manually kerning and the font rendering OK at size (although this will work a lot better in print than on-screen) but for text being set at 9 or 10 point you absolutely need a font with good kerning and hinting data. It will look terrible otherwise, and hinting and font design for screen rendering is another whole topic in itself.
Individual fonts aren't all that expensive, even if large collections like Adobe Font Folio can run into thousands. For a publication you're probably best off shelling out for the fonts you use as there are probably only going to be a few of them. If you're (for example) a jobbing printer with an in-house art department, or a graphic designer then you may have to shell out for a large font pack.
One little protip that's worth noting is that old versions of Corel Draw go for peanuts on ebay and come with a collection of around 1,000 high quality fonts from Bitstream. They also used to turn up in bargain bins quite often as well. Corel Draw is also a fairly decent drawing program and will run just fine on older hardware. It also comes with a paint program and a whole bunch of other stuff - it's always been good value for money.
And, yes, I used to work in this field at one point.