Looking through the older messages, it seems like integration with QGIS, in particular, is a common enough use case that it really should be discussed separately in the docs. I will be making a request to the QGIS team that Rasterio be included in the core distribution. A couple questions for the group:
1) Does anyone have experience writing QGIS plugins using Rasterio? If so, did you run into any problems, particularly those related to issue I pointed to above?
2) Is there a technical reason why Shapely was included in QGIS but Rasterio was not?
Thanks,
Ari