Let's say Tight Ars & Co. is a company with incredibly tight security policies, and lets assume I work for this company.  Assume they've one task that requires a python script to write to excel files, and I find this incredibly wonderful library called xlwt. Now my script is able to write to excel files, everything is wonderful and the sun is shining, I release the code, and suddenly I'm asked what is this thingamajig setup.py, why should we run it? wait, we'll not even run it, we want the environment to be clean from third party code etc etc, since I'm unaware of any wizardry or voo doo is there any way I can package the dependent libraries and import them in my script?
Unless I am misunderstanding the question you should be able to obtain the source archive and simply copy the "xlwt" directory to the same directory as your script and it should be importable from the local directory.
Python import module (xlwt) from archive