Participating Fully

Hi,

I’m new to blogging, and am helping my brother build a remotely-hosted site with its own (non-WP-templated) design and a blog page using WP (and, as necessary, WP design template).

A very basic question: Are remote users able to do everything and participate as closely with the WP.com community as people with sites there? To do so, would we also need to build anything on wordpress.com?

Any comments you can give are very appreciated. Thanks.

nate