We think conda is a useful tool, and have freed it for use by everyone.
Perhaps something like pip + a better virtualenv + wheel would be close, but we needed something that works now.
It manages dependencies that aren't python packages.
Furthermore, it allows multiple, side-by-side installations of said dependencies in a user's home directory. And it's cross platform.
None of the current solutions can do that... (Even including full-blown package managers, as they're effectively limited to a single platform.)
I'm not saying that pip is going anywhere, but they did have very good reasons for making yet another python package manager.
At any rate, pip is really fantastic, and I use it constantly.
However, being able to handle non-python dependencies is huge in the scientific world, where lots of python packages have a _lot_ of non-python dependencies. Widely-used packages (e.g. numpy, matplotlib, scipy, etc) don't have very many, and are well supported, but a lot of the less widely-used packages can be a real pain to build.
I'm excited about it because conda has the potential to replace a couple of virtual machines I currently keep around for this purpose. I'll certainly admit it's not a majority use-case, but if it works as advertised it will be very useful for me, at any rate.