You have to use the appropriate register type for the resource: b registers for constant buffers, t for textures, and u for UAVs. AFAIK, it is not possible to bind a UAV to a texture slot, or otherwise mismatch registers and resources.
However, a resource can have multiple views, so it is possible to have a resource bound as a UAV in one shader and as a regular texture (SRV) in another, which enables all the usual GPU texture sampling features to be used in the latter case.
The details of how the DirectX API concepts of slots, registers, and resources map to the actual hardware are vendor-specific. On one GPU they may literally represent registers of some kind, while on another they may represent a small chunk of metadata in memory somewhere, which describes the resource to the hardware.