The answer to your first question is easy ... yes! My best darkroom investment ever.
The second question is a bit more tricky to answer. I do not know if they updated the factory defaults to Ilford's new V papers. But even if they did, keep in mind that your enlarger setup plays an important role to this.
In my experience, and your mileage may vary of course, under the lens filters vs a VC head vs a colour head vs led lights all result in different exposure and/or contrast settings.
I think the ZMII is a wonderful tool, but to get the most out of it you'll either need to do your own paper calibration or re-calibrate your brain, so to speak, to work with the default factory settings. I went with the first option, but a number of forum members reported that they are very happy using the default settings after they gained some experience working with the various patches of gray.
