>>273808695
No, I mean that the runtime itself, you know, the SteamVR dashboard.exe or whatever it is, can't be distributed by anyone other than Valve (or maybe HTC, I haven't looked into that). That's just one of the reasons why Oculus doesn't let SteamVR builds of games onto their store.

>>273808785
SteamVR doesn't support everything by default. A manufacturer needs to create a SteamVR specific driver, and they need to install Steam and then SteamVR on every machine they wish to use with the headset. If there was a generic API everyone could write their drivers for instead that would work with all runtimes, they would just do that, but unfortunately, such an API is still being developed.