Sort of. That's really part of the Federal Circuit's ever-expanding scope of patentability, which the Supreme Court has made some moves to hem in (as noted in the third paragraph in the section you cite), and is a somewhat recent development. The Supreme Court in fact ruled exactly the opposite to the Federal Circuit's test that you paraphrase, ruling that "obvious to try"
is a valid obviousness test. In other words, even if encountering a totally novel problem, if a person with ordinary skill in the art would have also tried the same solution as yours, it should not be patentable. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR_v._TeleflexThe fact that the decision was unanimous has a lot of us hopeful that the new patent cases that the supreme court is taking on will see more of the federal circuit's nonsense cut back. It won't be patent reform, but it will be progress.
