Sensory Substitution

The brain is not preprogrammed to drive your body, but instead can figure out what ever the affordances are of whatever is there. We could actually build any kind of body we want because it's extremely flexible. Even patients who are paralyzed and have electrodes put into their motor cortex they can learn to drive a robotic arm. And so as you said, this is not as far from our current understanding of the brain as people used to think.