Yes you can connect an iDR direct to a laptop with an ethernet cable or you can connect a wifi router to the iDR and connect to it wirelessly.
You cannot send audio up or down the ethernet cable to/from a computer, you can only do that when you have a surface (R72/T80/T112) connected via ACE.
You can however use editor to control every aspect of the iLive / iDR including patching inputs and outputs.
So for example you could connect a microphone to an input and a speaker to an output and have complete control of both via editor.