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