Your correct, they used to have a Photo folder at iCloud Drive, but for me for a example it's gone.
No folder, I do access the Photo's trough beta.icloud.com
Sadly I hope they fix the following issues, if they hav'nt fixed it tomorrow after public release of 8.1 'll go back to dropbox.
1. You can't delete a picture from your phone without deleting it on iCloud.
As I only have 16GB iPhone 5s I did purchase 20GB of space at iCloud to keep all of my photo's there without needing to use my 16GB on the phone.
2. It seems that you can't "sync" it from iPhone -> iCloud Photo Library -> iPad.
It just works from one device to iCloud Photo Library and then it merge there and every picture are there, it don't sync trough devices for some reason.
That's where I access it from, beta.icloud.com. I figured it would show up in the regular site tomorrow, could be wrong though.
I'm still using dropbox, waiting to see tomorrow what happens. I don't see myself switching everything yet though as I only have 5gb of icloud and 12gb of dropbox. As you i need to see the implementation tomorrow.