Nah, that's just referring to the 5 friend invites that early access players get as part of the Founders Pack, you can definitely still join friends in-game. I'm guessing they want to see what the numbers are like without the additional players that mooch off their friends.
Anyway, I checked out a bit of the livestream that Q-Games did, game seems pretty much the same as it was in the Beta test, minus the bugs hopefully.
I did notice quite a lot of screen tearing though, definitely more than I ever encountered in the beta, which is a bit worrying.
This cracked me up:
[tweet]772940388126425088[/tweet]
Launch trailer:
There's even a bit of tearing in that (at 2:20)