If you know regular expressions, then that is true.
My collegues Phil Butcher and Sally Jordan did a detailed comparison of a propriatory system, pmatch and regular expression matching, and found that while all three could give high quality matching of sentence-length answers, of the three, pmatch was the one where it was easiest to write the matching rules: http://oro.open.ac.uk/20868/1/Butcher_&_Jordan.pdf, or http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131510000461 if you can get through the publisher's paywall.
So, I think it is worth having both pmatch and regex. Depending on the type of answer you want to match, either might be better.