It's not quite enough to fill the screen vertically on many PAL TVs (and especially not monitors which in general have less or no overscan at all), but even the PlayStation's and Saturn's (and PlayStation 2's!) PAL modes still have this problem, the framebuffer is just not big enough vertically.
Also the pixel aspect ratio is still distorted, because the 2D gfx assets haven't been redrawn. On later consoles, some (but not all) 3D titles do account for this, sometimes even the 2D assets (HUDs, menus, etc.) are drawn with a bit of vertical stretching, especially on PS2 where bilinear filtering is available.
Even on PS2 some games still have wrong timing in the official PAL release. Final Fantasy X comes to mind... music speed is correct, everything else runs slow (picture is vertically squished as well, Square just didn't care about doing proper PAL versions until later in the PS2 era).
This (and earlier and in general just better title availability) is why some people living in PAL countries always preferred to bypass the region locks (or just import NTSC hardware) and import NTSC releases.
I'm not sure if there are any console games by an European developer where the PAL version is actually the original or intended experience and better, but on old home computers (C64, Amiga, etc.) there definitely are.