Am I right in thinking......?

Depends what you mean by 'same'.  One, it may not have been a perfect rip to begin with, and two, sometimes media players will put a two second gap between every track, which may not be what you want.

If I want to start copyiny ripping cd's etc i windows media player good enough or should i be using somwthing like dppoweramp. Album art etc will also be neccessary. If I rip to wav for storage  sake can windows or dbpoweramp convert to flac?

I use Easy CD-DA Extractor, it costs a little bit but I love it for how quick and painless it for ripping, converting and organising. It does all the CD names/covers etc well. Converting from one format to another in batches is a sinch, allows you to assign however many CPUs you like to the convertion. Even use it to convert HD tracks down to CD quality for ABX testing. I would deffinitely buy it again.

I wouldn't recommend WMP for this - it's an app that tries to do everything, which isn't a recipe for best possible results.

To rip, I use Audiograbber, or EAC for problem discs. To convert to FLAC, I use lame XP.

I don't know about album art...

The key things with ripping are what format you rip to, will it be playable by your chosen streamer. Secondly, lossless or lossy, thirdly make sure that there is an error correction, where the ripped data is checked (checksum, not that I understand how this works), and you also want to use a ripper / format that tags other info, such as track labels, coverart etc. WMP is perfectly good at ripping, though I don't think it will rip to FLAC, so you would need to convert the resultant rips from whatever file extension it gives them to FLAC to play them on say iTunes. 

Some streamers (the one I use for example) will play just about any file format (and rip to any format)