Yes, it really is that simple.
While the main D&D 4e classes have a lot of choices, one key feature of the Essentials classes (especially the early ones) is that they make most of the choices for you.
So yes, you DO get all those awesome level 1 powers in the class table. If you were playing a PHB1 paladin, you'd get to choose some of them from larger lists, but you'd still get a ton of powers and features.
If that seems overpowered, it's by design.
As I mentioned here, 4e is about heroes doing heroic things, not ordinary people scraping up every advantage in order to survive. The mechanics want you to feel cool and capable from the very first encounter.
To this end, classes get all their iconic features right out of the gate: that leads to some front-loading of powers at level 1.
The idea is older still: it looks like it came to D&D via Dave Arneson's Blackmoor
The dragon, a large mythological beast, is found in a variety of story telling traditions from multiple cultures. Some breath fire ("Smaug the Golden" being an example), some are just big and nasty (St George and the Dragon), some breath poison, and some are mystical beings who can shape change into human form. (Chinese myths and legends). Tolkien referred to a cold drake being killed by one of the ancestors of the Rohirrim (LoTR), and Ancalagon the Black being the greatest of flying dragons(Silmarillion, First age). In most stories, one dragon is villain enough.
As I touched on in this answer, dragons ended up in D&D as an eclectic mix of creatures inspired by a multiple story telling traditions. Putting multiple kinds and colors of dragon into one setting wasn't original to D&D, insofar as a story idea. The novel Dragonflight, published in 1968, was the first of the Pern dragon novels by Anne McCaffrey. She had multiple hues of dragons flying about, interacting with dragon riders and other characters while battling the Thread that threatened Pern. The various colored dragons had differing status and personality types based on color1. (I read the book in 1975).
Game-wise, whether or not this setting inspired Gygax, Arneson, and TSR is unknown, but it's likely given the wide variety of adventure stories, sci-fi, fantasy, swords and sorcery tales, legends, and speculative fiction that inspired and provided ideas for the fantasy game in the first place. Multiple kinds and colors of dragons in the game's lore may be a first for a game, (Blackmoor/D&D) but Pern certainly predated it in literature. That dragons in general were described differently in different story telling traditions for millennia makes the general idea very, very old in the treatment of this iconic creature.
Blame it on Blackmoor
Was it a "first" in D&D as published or from something earlier?
From a post at Dragonsfoot: (Poster Harvard, Fri April 27, 2012, 10:48 am)
It appears that Dave Arneson and Richard Snider were the first to use dragons of different sizes, colors and breath weapons in an RPG. These were in the Blackmoor campaign (1970/1971) time frame (-Harvard- calls it the "proto" D&D era for Blackmoor) which is three years before Dungeons and Dragons was first published.
1From the summary at Wikipedia, which squares with what I remember from the story. Dragons with different colors had differing personality templates.
The dragons come in several colors which generally correlate with their sizes; blue males, green females, brown males, bronze males, and golden females – queens. Bronzes, the largest males, are by tradition the only ones who compete to win the queens in their mating flights. The green females are banned from breeding as they produce only small, less talented dragons. The golden queens are not only the largest dragons, they also hold a subtle control over their dragon communities Weyrs. {Gold dragons did not breath fire as that interferes with breeding -- credit to @MichaelRichardson}
That idea wasn't cut and pasted into D&D. There were no "red dragons" in Pern: they breathed fire /phosgene gas after chewing on certain rocks. Anne McCaffery wasn't writing a game, she was telling a story that took that which was familiar from older story telling traditions -- flying dragons that breath fire -- and folded it into a sci-fi setting in a novel way.
Best Answer
June 6, 2008 to December 31, 2019
This ENWorld thread declares that D&D Insider was live as of Jun 6, 2008. An archived copy of the D&DI News page, also dated June 6, 2008, announces the launch of the new Dragon and Dungeon. That issue's Ampersand column names that date "D&D Day", and signifies the the official launch of the D&D 4e core rulebooks.
However, as that article states, most of the D&D Insider features were not available at launch. D&D Insider at this point consisted of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. According to this Gleemax forum post by D&D Insider executive producer Ken Troop, dated June 7, 2008, the Compendium and other tools were not available at launch.
The service was meant to launch fully complete as a paid service, but was initially free due to its incomplete status. As late as this Ampersand article dated May 7, 2008, WotC were still hoping to have at least the Compendium ready at launch, with the service charging a price of $14.95/month following an initial period of beta testing and introductory pricing.
The last Dragon/Dungeon issues were December 2013, but the service was still available. By July 29, 2014, for example, you could still subscribe to D&D Insider, at $9.95/month or $5.95/month with annual subscription. It consisted mainly the Compendium, character builder, monster builder, and the Dragon and Dungeon magazines. You could still subscribe to D&D Insider after the release of D&D 5th edition.
According to this article, D&D Insider was scheduled to finally shut down on December 31, 2019. This Reddit thread shares an email notice that the service would be free of charge during December 2019 and anyone who already paid for that month would be offered refunds. You can see in the web archive that the Compendium search page was still online as of December 22, 2019, but unavailable by May 24, 2020.
The reason given for the shutdown was that Microsoft was ending support for the Silverlight platform, which the D&D Character Builder relied on after moving from a Windows-only desktop program to a web-based Silverlight version. The advantage of the Silverlight version was that it opened up Mac support, but a major reason for the change was probably to prevent people from simply paying for a single month and downloading all the character data, or just pirating a copy.
Several major features were ultimately never completed, including a character visualizer, dungeon builder, 3D virtual gametable, and 2D virtual gametable.