On the Toptal.com blog there's a recent post about true dependency injection with Symfony between components in your application and only using the dependency injection container for its intended purpose.

Symfony2, a high performance PHP framework, uses Dependency Injection Container pattern where components provide a dependency injection interface for the DI-container. This allows each component to not care about other dependencies. [...] But this means DI-container can be used as a Service Locator.

[...] In this article we will try to build a Symfony2 application without implementing Service Locator pattern. We will follow one simple rule: only DI-container builder can know about DI-container.

They start off by talking about the structure of the dependency injection container and how it relates to the three main types: controller, method and property injections. He then starts in on creating the sample project and requiring only the Symfony DI, configuration and Yaml components. He then creates a ContainerBuilder class and sets up the HttpKernel functionality to pull the response from the container. He then makes a simple controller with a default action that just responds with text. With this working he updates it to pull in an input variable. He then makes updates to the application with changes to the route handing, templating (Twig), Doctrine (database) and tag handling.