With Essentials 2012, there are three deployment options for messaging
and collaboration services for which we provide an integrated
management experience:
On-Premises. Essentials 2012 contains integration with an on-premises
Exchange Server running on a second server, which can be either
physical or virtual.
Office 365. Essentials 2012 builds on the previous Office 365
Integration Module for SBS 2011 Essentials. This option is now part of
the core product (no separate download is required) and it allows
customers that have an Office 365 account to use this service for
their email.
Hosted Exchange. Hosted Exchange providers can offer add-ins to
Essentials 2012 that will allow customers to select this option. We
know that there are many different types of hosted email providers.
While we have focused on hosted Exchange email providers, we
engineered the product to be email service agnostic which allows
non‑Exchange based email providers to be integrated through this
mechanism (note that this specific feature is not available in the
beta).
It does not. The following clip from the Server 2012 Essentials blog sums it up: