Correct, I just did this yesterday while idly fidgeting around with my phone. Fortunately I cancelled it in time to avoid creating a false alarm. Glad to hear it can be turned off, doing that now. WTF were they thinking, making it so easy to trigger by accident?

(Edit: OK, I'm confused. There doesn't seem to be an option to disable the emergency trigger entirely, but there's an "Auto Call" slider whose relationship to the feature is unclear. This slider is turned off, yet the phone still went into emergency mode when I clicked the button a few times. What a half-assed feature, sadly typical of Apple's work lately.)

They made it easy to trigger so that people can use it as a panic button. That was a customer request.