The pip integration is basically to allow pip to find wheels on PyPI
or any local indexes you have, and to install them via the "pip
install" command.

it also offers "pip wheel" for building wheels (using bdist_wheel) locally for your requirements, since wheels wouldn't be pervasive on PyPI for a while

so, let's say you have a large app that has a requirements file, that ultimately installs 90 packages.

run: pip wheel --wheel-dir=/my_wheels -r requirements.txt

this will produce 90 wheel archives in a local directory, that you can then install against.

Marcus