OK, so figured I had nothing to lose. It seems if you use the auto-setup and enter a hotmail.com or outlook.com you lose the sync feature.
If you “lie” to it and tell it you are using Exchange Server, and enter your hotmail/outlook account info, then it functions like Outlook does in the sense that it syncs things between multiple workstations via the outlook.com servers.
So it does work, at least for mail. I haven’t tried address books or calendaring (I don’t use calendaring).