Does the microcontroller need to handle raw, touch-screen input?

No, the raw touch screen information is acquired and processed and updated in the respective register for the MCU to read. EVE does the noise filtering for the resistive touch-screen. The x, y data is loaded into registers to be read by the MCU. In addition, a resistive location can be defined and mapped to a specific character (i.e. a specific alpha-numeric) so that this specific character is transferred from the FT8XX to the MCU, such that the MCU need not execute any parsing functions.