Lee,
I'm not sure Locarno is being entirely accurate saying "you get loads of time off". The training centre in NZ is a 7-day-a-week operation. The times you can be scheduled to fly varies depending on the season (due to daylight hours, obviously) but by the time you're there it'll be getting towards summer so you can expect to be scheduled any time between 06:30 and 20:00. There are limits to the number of hours you can do in a day, however, so if you did get two flights in a day you wouldn't get them at the two extremes. Last summer it used to shut by 5pm at weekends, although whether that will be the same this time round I don't know.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, you are not allowed to do more than 6 days consecutively and must have 3 off in 14. This means you'll get an adequate number of days off, but don't automatically assume you will get weekends free. It is true you get the use of a couple of vehicles and can use them to go places in your spare time, but training activities obviously take priority.
The ground school system has changed slightly, it was until recently all self-study but now there are classroom lessons to go with the computer-based study.
How hard is the course? Well, it's impossible to put on a scale of 1-10 (what exactly are you comparing it to?) but suffice to say if you've passed selection then they obviously believe you probably won't have an issue coping with it.