No you dont need any control file at all, although it is recomendable to have one (binary or sql like). If you dont have any you could recreate the controlfile and treat it as a backup controlfile.

With recover using backup controlfile Oracle doesnt know which SCN to stop and will only stop until we say so. With recover database command Oracle does know where and when to stop.

The conclusion is as long as we have a backup of datafiles and all archive logs we can recover the database until last archive log. And if we have the online redo logs we can recover until point of failure. Well this is my conclusion :)