Yeah, that is that way if statements work in the templates. You use <%if FieldName%> and <%endif%> and then if there's any value whatsoever in the field, it will display... otherwise, it's just skipped. You can also use <%ifnot FieldName%> to display alternate text if there's no value in the field.
But what you can't do is something like <%if FieldName = "Whatever"%> so it's still quite limiting. Your options are to print the text or skip the text, but not decide what to print based on what the value of the field is. Still in all I've come up with some really powerful templates for Links. They work better than I'd expected them to at first.
