Exactly this, and occasionally you'd have multiple words come up for the same number combo, but in a consistent manner where the user could learn how many times you needed to hit the 'next' button to get the word you wanted.
The phone I used t9 on the most had the "next" button on the * key, an option to sort based on frequency, and replaced the word with "spell?" before cycling the list allowing you to manually edit the word and add it to your dictionary. I assume disabling that sorting function was preferred for people blind-texting.
