When we bought, the sales lady told both of us (on separate queries) that it's the 8/1 box, but we both (myself and a work colleague) ended up with 16/2 variants (it ended up as a combined order). I'm not sure if it was an error in shipping the wrong units or a sales rep not clued up, but we aren't complaining!
There is (was?) full Playstore support. Once you reached the latest update (as of this posting) the Playstore and supporting apps are uninstalled, but you are given the option to reinstall manually- with instructions on how to, from within the OS, which is a bit odd- which I have done, and everything works 100% perfectly.
All the apps I've downloaded (which aren't a lot though) work perfectly.
I mostly use Kodi, but I also stream via Google Play Music, have installed Plex client which also works very well.
I'm very happy with the unit and its performance, my thoughts were more to the point of what others would think about it hardware wise (and the custom take on the OS)- so maybe I shouldn't have led with a question, or phrased it differently.