I confirm about the pain. They should be transparent and you shouldn't need to care about them but that's absolutely not the case. Also, it's the responsibility of the pypi maintener to push wheels on it, but none do this, so you end up building your own wheels while this should have already been done on pypi and it's stupid. And one last thing: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/426700148409135104 "It turns out, Python binary wheels on Python 2 are rejected by PyPI, I suppose because of the lack of UCS tag in the filename."

Apart from all of this pain, I'm very happy to be able to use them.

I'm really waiting for someone to build a "wheel on demand" website that would be a proxy to pypi. Or to turn pypi into a wheel farm (I don't know how realist this idea is).