Yes, like macworks said, it does. Does it quite frequently to me.
There are some caveats, though, which are intrinsic to the type of layout the web page author used: for example, cells in a table will begin to render as soon as the information is downloaded, whereas layers in a CSS layout will only appear once all information in that layer is downloaded (or vice-versa, something like that). Of course, this is a function of the layout and not the browser, so it would be similar under Firefox, IE or any other browser that's halfway standards-compliant.