Exactly, though I would claim that you can't underplay how important Iron Maiden was for the evolution of metal. I don't really listen to them much these days, and anything after Powerslave is of little interest to me. Anyway, I would say Killers and The Number of the Beast are two of the best metal records from that period
Growing up in Norway, we had one government run TV channel and two government run radio channels which rarely played anything heavier than the Rolling Stones, commercial TV and radio didn't appear until well into the 80's, so we relied heavily on what friends and acquaintances had, trading tapes and such. There are bands I never even heard of until much later. Riot for example, judging from what I've heard from the period I got into metal I think would have been right up my alley at the time, I didn't even know existed until a couple of years ago. Fortunately metal fans were always eager to share, so I quickly got a taste of bands like Judas Priest, Accept, Dio, Scorpions, and even Y&T, to name a few