The wheels spec discusses the benefits of the format:
The wheel binary package format frees installers from having to know about the build system, saves time by amortizing compile time over many installations, and removes the need to install a build system in the target environment.
It's unclear to me what this means (some sort of component package caching or something).
Thanks.
It means you spend a little more time setting up a build server and wheel distribution system (for packages that don't already have wheels posted) but you save a few seconds or minutes on every package install so eventually you save time overall in the long run.