Correct. At least in physics, there's no paper. The abstract is what's submitted to the conference, and gets published before the conference begins. Peer review is limited to deciding whether your talk gets into the conference schedule or not, slotted into a different division of the conference, or perhaps to a poster session.

You could contact the author and see if they have a preprint or something to share.

The intent is to provide an outlet for "lesser" stature work, student projects, or preliminary results en route to writing a full paper. I was a physics student 25 years ago, and there was an informal culture of "everybody gets to publish." You were pretty much guaranteed a slot at one of the conferences, even if it was a poster session in a dark hallway alongside the guys who were proving that quantum mechanics was a hoax. That way, nobody could say, "they refused to publish me." And the field was never so crowded that there wasn't room for a few of those abstracts.

How it should be done in the contemporary era is of course an open question. ;-)