Exactly what I've been saying (well, assuming).
I do like shortcuts, although I would think that you'd want them for your most-used items, not your least used. That's exactly the type of thing I'd have no idea how to do outside of Windows.
Drag and drop holding Cmd and Option to create an alias, just like a bookmark. Or right-click and select to create an alias. These are live, and will follow the original file wherever you move it on the computer.
Additionally, OS X gets symbolic links from UNIX. For all intents and purposes, the symbolic link is the original file (UNIX folders are files), not a shortcut. And it gets hard links, a level lower, which are in the file system as another name for the file's data. A system of multiple hard links is used to run Time Machine's backup.
Windows can do these too, but it's pretty difficult and dangerous unless you know what you're doing. A program called ntfslink can smooth things a little.