I think you're right, but "typical" is the key word. Embedded systems, systems where overcommit is disabled, bumping into low ulimit -v settings, etc can all trigger an immediate failure with malloc(). Those are edge cases, to be sure, but some of them could be applied to a typical Linux system and me, as a coder, won't be aware of it.

As an aside: To me, checking malloc() for NULL is easier than checking a pointer returned by malloc on first use. That's what you're supposed to do in the presence of overcommit.