I am going to Portugal within the next 6 weeks with the main aim of opening a bank account and don't expect any problems. The intention is to move there eventually so having an account is a must and agree with you it makes things far better than just using an ATM funding from bank account externally from another country.
So many people here waste so much money on ATM fees by default. They think it doesn't matter because it is just a few dollars every time but I think that is very short-sighted. For someone that spends years here that is a lot of money lost to the banks not to mention that you can be guaranteed they are hiding some of the fee from the customer in the exchange rate they offer.
I am charged high fees for using my UK debit cards here and found one bank that charges less, but it is still 10 x the fee of local bank cards.