What happens if I import a CD to iTunes?

I have a lot of physical CD's at home.

As I have recently bought an iPhone, I imported the songs of a CD as a test. Everything ran OK, I think: iTunes recognized the CD (I don't know how they did this magic with a CD from 1996) and downloaded all the songs.

But now I have a doubt: can iTunes identify this album as the same album they have on iTunes Store? I mean, can they identify as if I had bought the virtual album? If it were possible, then I would be able to download them for free in my iDevices, without having to connect via USB.

Sure you can copy them to devices, I always just rip my CDs to MP3 then add to my itunes file list, then copy over just like anything else.