It's counter intuitive at first, but the key to understand how this works is that while you can use an MMU to assign chunks of physical memory to a process, you

It's counter intuitive at first, but the key to understand how this works is that while you can use an MMU to assign chunks of physical memory to a process, you can of course also just use the MMU to assign the memory mapped IO registers of say a PCI express peripheral to a process. That is in a nutshell what a "userland driver" is. It's not too far removed from poking the parallel port at 0x378 on your DOS computer :)