There should be a book or a collection of tutorials how to use jquery, jquery-ui and knockoutjs together in Mangeto 2 for front-end developement (main focus on checkot page customisation) !
Also, there is a good serie of articles form Alan Storm about the M2 UI Components (and more). Maybe you want to take a look here: http://alanstorm.com/category/magento-2/
I needed to crate a autocomplete input field in checkout. Finnaly after a weeks I found out that i can not do it using only jquery-ui, but i needed also to use knockout js. I found also that the errors i got were because of the conflict between those two. Fortunately I found some caid tutorial how to do it but still !
