As far as app installations go, the sooner Linux (and Windows) moves over to the "drag-and-drop" OS X model, where apps have their own libraries and depend on the OS only for basic functions, the better.
You've always been able to "install" sufficiently simple Windows applications like that, there are several that I use regularly and that I can copy from machine to machine just by copying their directory. I would expect the same to be the case with Linux.
You sometimes then have to build some of the usual functions of an installer into the application, to pick a trivial example the ability to poke around in the registry to register its own file types, but that's often not a bad way to proceed anyway.