Personally, I think it would be a hard sell, since for conda Python is just another package that it expects to have been consistently built and available. E.g. if you’re asking to be able to point conda to an existing python.org Python installation to satisfy the requirement, then that would be contrary to its purpose: to have a consistent build and runtime environment (e.g. matching ABIs).
That is the much more interesting question of the two and I think I’d like to say yes, while knowing that the attempts so far (conda-press, conda-build-wheel) were not fully thought out. I’d rather see an evolution of the wheel format to optionally include conda-style features and make hacks (like the recent nodejs-bin package on PyPI) not needed. But maybe it would be enough to create a “conda” platform tag for conda?
One idea I discussed with @henryiii shortly was whether adding another backend to cibuildwheel that would (via a Docker image) provide the same build environment that conda packages are built in and add a PEP 517 backend to conda-build to produce wheel files out of conda recipes. If it were implemented in conda-build directly, it would be able to handle package name validation etc easier.
Maintainers could continue to use cibuildwheel (which is an automated way of running the build tool) to build their wheel files shipped to PyPI, but ALSO create wheel files that would fit in with conda environments. Whether the latter wheel files would eventually live on PyPI or elsewhere is a different question, though.
In other words, it’s an appealing idea, but I don’t think we are there yet.
That’s the big question for sure. I think so far, due to the way the PyPA is governed, there wasn’t a need to limit the work to one ecosystem alone, and the spec work has a positive impact on the ecosystem, looking at the number of tools other than pip/setuptools.
Given the difficulties with coordinating the work with Linux distros over the years, I think it’s fair to say that there are different opinions on how Python packaging should be done. I feel conda is also just another of those opinions, albeit one from another part of the Python community originally. As such, I’m quite excited about @rgommers’ upcoming project to document the main problems of non-PyPA users with wheels, which he pre-announced above.