[Drunken F00l]

You join a 'lobby', then when you press Go, the game then searches for a server matching that criteria and you're on your way.

This is correct. No server browser. By default, you can't even use the connect command to connect to a specific server. It will reject you saying that it requires lobby reservation.

There is a workaround so that the connect command works but then if a party from a lobby gets assigned to the server it takes presidence and nobody else can join until the entire party has left.

1 server can actually handle multiple simultaneous games, am i wrong with that assumption?

You have to run mutliple instance of srcds.