To be fair, they are probably showing the ground combat at the moment as that's the more dynamic, trailer friendly part of the game. Showing the strategic interface just isn't sexy enough for Marketing to sign off on.
It's presumably going to have a similar upgrade path to standard XCOM where you can get the plasma tech later on; the backstory of XCOM2 from what I've heard is that it's a setting where XCOM never really got off the ground in the first place and was curbstomped very early on, before they got a lot of the research done.