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Depends on the mount and hand controller. For instance in polar unaligned mode the SkySensor2000-PC can point and track accurately up to about 20 degrees off the pole given a 3 star align (and adjust for refraction of the air using King rates) - whether its tracking DSO, planets, the moon or satellites, but I'd expect you'd get field rotation even if the central spot tracks perfectly.
But the thing is if you're photographing something you don't want any source of error, pointing, tracking, flexure, mirror shift or flop, focus change through temperature variance, seeing error - nothing. So over time you go to significant effort to eliminate each of these sources of error. Most gear I expect won't track well if you're mis-aligned, and even then track well is subjective. At long focal length on long duration "track well" has to be pretty precise - down to arc seconds per hours maybe.
So yes learn drift alignment - and realise mirror shift / slop on an SCT or Newt - even tiny amounts - could just slightly alter your polar alignment precision. Barely noticable on 3-6 mintue shots, but significant when you go beyond 10 minutes at longer focal length.
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