Definitely! If you're not aiming for a multicolumn layout, feel free to nest directly within the container. Take a look at how it's done on the main page of Bootstrap docs:
<div class="bs-docs-featurette">
<div class="container">
<h2 class="bs-docs-featurette-title">Designed for everyone, everywhere.</h2>
<p class="lead">Bootstrap makes front-end web development faster and easier. It's made for folks of all skill levels, devices of all shapes, and projects of all sizes.</p>
<hr class="half-rule">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img src="assets/img/sass-less.png" alt="Sass and Less support" class="img-responsive">
<h3>Preprocessors</h3>
<p>In addition to vanilla CSS, Bootstrap includes support for the two most popular CSS preprocessors, <a href="../css/#less">Less</a> and <a href="../css/#sass">Sass</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img src="assets/img/devices.png" alt="Responsive across devices" class="img-responsive">
<h3>One framework, every device.</h3>
<p>Bootstrap easily and efficiently scales your project with one code base, from phones to tablets to desktops.</p>
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img src="assets/img/components.png" alt="Components" class="img-responsive">
<h3>Comprehensive docs</h3>
<p>With Bootstrap, you get extensive and beautiful documentation with hundreds of live examples, code snippets, and more.</p>
</div>
</div>
<hr class="half-rule">
<p class="lead">Bootstrap is open source. It's hosted, developed, and maintained on GitHub.</p>
<a href="https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap" class="btn btn-outline btn-lg">View the GitHub project</a>
</div>
</div>
A noteworthy point is that the p.lead and button are both placed directly under the container. Rows and columns should only be utilized when structuring actual columns.