I believe it's supposed to be open source, thus you don't really need the daemon, you can probably make the service calls yourself. The daemon however, will ensure that your cert is replaced on auto-renewal, so for something fairly hands off, that be pretty cool.
Right now the "daemon" is planned to be another Python script run from /etc/cron.daily to examine your certs to see if any of them need to be renewed, and then try to renew them automatically. If you don't want the autorenewal, you can turn it off in what will probably be /etc/letsencrypt/renewal.conf, or with a command-line option when you obtain the cert, or use the standalone configurator (which won't enroll the cert in the renewal database), or write your own client for the ACME protocol that doesn't do autorenewal at all.
