The touchscreen itself supports both taps and swipes as well as up to 50 customizable channel icons, and the box lists both online setup and on-remote customization as features.
The bottom line for now is that the remote is mostly just used during the optional TV-based setup (not optional if you choose to use WiFi), but there is a lot of potential here.
The result will be a product that avoids many setup foibles and complexities of digital video recorders while allowing use of the increasingly versatile streamlined Apple Remote.