Absolutelly, if you can't use it with a remote and have to use a keyboard and mouse it's not the same thing.

However, my setup is easilly controllable with a remote: I have Kodi running always on top in it and use one of these.

With that the sofa experience is the same as with a dedicated TV Box (except that the remote can't power it ON, only OFF, but for me it's fine since I leave it always ON) because that remote just sends the right "keypresses" to control Kodi (apparently the shortcut keys are standard) so from a user point of view one interacts with it the same as with a TV Box or Smart TV.

The PC-ish stuff (such as managing the bittorrent server) I do remotelly from my main PC via SSH and web interfaces.

Mind you, I have a keyboard and mouse connected to it because sometimes I want to use the browser, but if all you're doing is watching stuff like with a TV Box, that's not needed.