I also have been toying with the USART and I think had a misconception of what "in the background" meant. I've come to believe it means the USART will suck in two bytes at any time they arrive as long as the buffer is empty. This gives you some time to get there and read them, thus emptying the buffer for another two bytes to arrive. I use the Receive interrupt because I'm receiving 5 bytes at a time. If your program is fast enough I would think you could just poll the RCIF and grab a byte at a time.

I could be way off here but I'm still learning too.