Help understanding Perlin Noise
Yep, you've got that right. In Perlin's reference implementation of "improved noise", the noise will be periodic, repeating after 256 units along each axis. It's usually not very noticeable even if you have a large extent of noise visible, since there's no large-scale features for the eye to track.

But there's no particular reason it needs to tile after 256 units; that's pretty much just an arbitrary choice made by Perlin. He uses a permutation table as a hash function to map grid coordinates to gradient vectors, and the hard-coded table is of size 256, so has to be tiled after that.

However, any other hash function you like could be used as well. It just has to pseudorandomly map the integer parts of the x, y, z coordinates to a gradient vector.