Yeah, PvP is still in, but I've honestly not even touched it. It's completely optional, but still a perfectly valid way of progressing in the game as well. The PvE was quite unpolished when I first started, but it's gotten a lot better and a lot more fleshed out. At the moment it's a bit of an invasion mechanic, with NPC invaders dropping in and stealing capture points from the players. These capture points don't do much at the moment other than provide a resupply point and a safe place to respawn, but that might change later. There's also the "thumpers" Which are basically drop pod mining machines which you call in onto ore deposits. They take between a couple and 5 minutes to fill up but attract a lot of wildlife as they work, which you have to defend it from. It used to be somewhat easy to protect one of the lower level ones by yourself, but that's changed. Now there really aren't too many solo opportunities, so you need to work together with other people to do most things. There are a few other things that occur, mini-missions that you can take as they appear near you. You're given map markers to most of them, or radio cues. Some are somewhat easy, others are incredibly tough and take a good 4 to 8 people to take on effectively.
If you haven't given it a try in a few months, it's definitely changed a lot. It still needs a bit more polish, but there is definitely a lot more substance there than there used to be, even in the relatively short time I've been involved.