To address your original question, no it doesn't give it the same behaviours.
Attributes are sort of like box containers. They're another way of storing data. BUT the key difference is using the GET attribute or SET attribute you can find out about a value from another object.
Say you have a game where you have some enemies, each with their own health.
Before attributes you would have a complicated way of handling the logic because it wasn't so easy to get each enemies health. You would either need to have all your attack logic on each object, use send/receive message, or do other messy things. Now every object can share it's health with any other object in the scene.
So essentially, attributes are a way for objects to tell other objects about them self.
Another example is the built in physics behaviours, each object has a gravity, mass, etc. These are attributes predefined by hyperPad. We have "Set Gravity" and "Get Gravity" and you can do that to any object in your scene.
But with attributes you can do things like "Get bannanas" Or "get sdgldfjkgjldkfgsd" what ever you want. Now what you do with those heavily depends on the rest of your behaviours.
