I know that Tortoise HG (the windows explorer Mercurial plugin) uses Python internally, but does it expose Python so that I can use it for other purposes?
If I try to use python from the command line It's not recognized (as far as I can tell)
Bitbucket's getting started tutorial states (my emphasis):
if you are on Windows you can download and install TortoiseHg. This bundles Python and Mercurial.
This Tortoise Hg FAQ page states:
TortoiseHg includes an entire Python distribution bundled up as DLLs
Does that mean I just need to find it, and add it to the path? Or is it only available to tortoise and it's plugins exclusively?
The FAQ is saying that a program like py2exe was used to make it so that anyone could drop it on their computer without having to worry about having the right version of python installed. If you want to use the python API for mercurial check out their home page. If you want a portable copy of python go here http://www.portablepython.com/