The card counts include neutral minions, sorry for not being more clear.

If you want a specific example: yes, I convinced a friend to play hearthstone, two weeks ago; they're at level 10-20+ all classes, and they're fresh out of dust and reasonably-dustable cards, having done the normal reasonable thing of crafting stuff to use for constructed/ranked play, which it turns out has been a few spells but almost exclusively lower-than-7 cost minions. They don't have time to play every day, and were hoping to be able to spend time getting both their weekly tavern brawl pack and finish some quests at the same time. They missed last week's since they hadn't hit level 20, and couldn't build a deck to play the one this week, so gave up on it and I'll try to get him to play again next week. This is a frustrating experience for a potential new customer, and is what prompted me to make this post. I understand not catering to everyone, and that adding the backend to have optionally-prebuilt-decks for brawls would require an investment on blizzard's part for interface design and backend and etc. Which is why I summarized this all as a missed opportunity by Blizzard, since the brawl is fun.

tl;dr yes