How SEP Policies and Features work together

Hi, hopefully a quick and easy question. Ive trawled through the admin and implementation guide, but cant find a definitave answer to this:

Will a SEP policy apply to a client if the client doesnt have the feature installed?

For example, we have a client that doesnt have the Intrusion Prevention feature installed. BUT the client is in a Group that does have a policy assigned for IPS. Will this cause issues, or will SEP simply say, i dont have that feature, so i wont attempt to apply the policy.

Many Thanks!