yeah close,
The primary difference being, the GUI software will reside on your desktop as a light weight app, and the server will then be free and have all the horsepower to run the required apps.
The other probably being the philosphy, cloudpanel treats the server it installs on as important and not disposable and hence expects you to treat the server that way.
With the way I am going about it, I plan to treat VMs as disposible resources with very little time required to set them up, iterate or dispose of. (I am thinking more in the direction of poor man's Kubernetes)
We are planning to release a short video of it soon, hopefuly that will make it more apparent 🙂