CommunityEngine

I notice CE has a collection of pretty popular plugins under the hood. Are these plugins fairly easily "swappable" with other plugin solutions, or will CE not work right, or require a lot of hacking, without the included plugins??

For example, I'm not sure what type of authentication CE uses...so what if we went with the popular "restful-authentication" plugin from technoweenie? Does CE play well with other plugin solutions or is it not really recommended? Thanks!