You'd hope so, but some printers run some very finicky software with less horsepower than your desktop machine so can fall over on complex PDF structures. I preferred Postscript!
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding but PCL is another page description language like PS, some printers can use both depending on the driver.
Most of our Xerox printers spoke Postscript natively, these days more printers can use PDF. We generally used a tool to convert PCL to PS to suit our workflow if that was the only option for the file, because being able to manipulate the file (reordering and applying barcodes or minor text modifications) was important. Likewise for AFP and other formats. PCL jobs were rare so I never worked on them personally.
