No, I think pitch accents and tones are a little different. NationMaster Encyclopedia explains it well:
Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. In a pitch-accented language, there is one accented syllable or mora in a word, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word.
This is unlike the situation in tone languages, where the tone of each syllable can be independent of the other syllables in the word. For example, comparing two-syllable words like [aba] in a pitch-accented language and in a tonal language, both of which only distinguish low tone from high, the tonal language has four possible patterns: low-low [àbà], high-high [ábá], high-low [ábà], low-high [àbá]. The pitch-accent language, on the other hand, only has two possibilities: accented on the first syllable, [ába], or on the second, [abá].
But this confuses me, too. Shouldn't there be a third way to pronounce "aba," that being with no accent at all? Then again, I've read that unaccented words are low-high. But if that's the case, where does this flat inflection that my dictionary talks about come in? :wassat: