Yup, customizing comments should do the trick for you. No need to reinvent the wheel and you can take advantage of many plugins that take the comments functionality a few steps further.
You can use some plugin to add the rating functionality (GD star rating seems to be the most used one) or use comments meta fields to write your own.
When it comes to styling be sure to check the output of body_class() and post_class() functions – you should find a class referencing your post type there.