Correct. I'm no fan of Canonical when they try to impose their will (Unity of course being the biggest example), but for fuck's sake people this is making a big deal out of literally nothing.
Quoting directly from the Canonical Intellectual Property Rights Policy (emphasis mine):
Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu.
Just like Mozilla, just like Red Hat, and just like many other major open source projects Ubuntu uses trademarks to protect their brand. Don't use their brand and you're just forking an open source project as normal. See also Iceweasel, CentOS, etc.