Thanks for the confirmation Fedya!
In this case then, as Jannis has noted, Eclipse client access is required in all landscapes. The Admin UI does not have the Transport tab available anymore, which now makes sense.
I think the documentation needs to be sanitized -- my client also found some misdirection with the UI install guide that pointed to the 7.1 UI sca file, which they followed diligently and installed and of course ran into trouble and went berserk troubleshooting before I started on the project. Although logically they realized that they had to stick to the 8.0 download, they wanted confirmation from SAP and waited for their OSS message to be confirmed.
All the best,
Ashok