That's possible - the "finger friendly" GUI does look a bit like Canola and I don't mean to be unkind to Canola but that suggests the device is "dumbed down" so it may indeed be more restrictive than the Nokia platform.

I suspect that since Intel are only offering reference platforms (ie. example hardware) that anyone can put whatever they want on the device once the hardware is for sale, and since it will be mostly based on PC hardware I imagine there might be several distributions and GUIs offered in the long term - whether a desktop GUI is appropriate for this type of device is up for debate.