The difference is important, since in the traditional MS model, each program that wants to do the remote thing needs to essentially implement its own client-server setup, albeit with a massive amount of help from various runtimes. Named pipes and central authentication made this approach not quite as horrible as it sounds.
This new API is a departure from this model. It will make it possible to just remote via text streams. Perhaps that's uglier --- everyone knows in-band signaling is fragile. But long experience shows they just remoting the damn text streams is easily the more pragmatic option.