I set one up some months ago. Had some hassles with getting the account switched, but once set up it worked fine.
You get a Visa Debit card as standard. All the standard bank cards from Ulster Bank are now Visa Debit cards of some sort, as far as I'm aware. They phased them in last October, if memory serves me right.
The staff themselves seem to be confused about what the account does. Their call centre in NI seemed to think it was a savings account and couldn't do direct debits. But lo and behold... they worked just fine!
At my local branch, I was told I couldn't make online payments to another account with a Step Account. At first, the online banking threw up an error, sure enough, then suddenly about two weeks after I asked my branch, the error disappeared, and I was able to add payees to my online banking. Probably was always the case that I could do it and was just a question of a delay in setting it up.
My experience has been that the staff in Irish banks often don't know themselves precisely what the product can or can't do.