Well, sure, but setting up the build environment is pretty easy! You just specify the libraries as you normally would, and it works. The only difference is that those libraries are only available to that package, and not globally. The function `stdenv.mkDerivation` will actually build a standard ./configure && make style C project for you if you provide it some package source, you just have to copy out the build artifacts (with something like (cp project bin/project) and specify a list of libraries needed at build/runtime.

Agree that the documentation for all of this could be a lot better and more discoverable. It's good once you get over the initial hump though.