Yes and no. A true lottery predictably periodic - it happens in rounds. PoW puzzles are async and so the chain can fork. The second property of the crypto puzzle kicks in here - the statistically predictable number of hashes necessary to solve the puzzle which can then be used to calculate an average time necessary to create a valid block. With a forking chain, it's this time gap that secures the chain against rewrites. So yes, PoW is used to distribute block creation among the network but it differs from a true lottery system in that it is not synchronized into rounds.