NuGet adds the assemblies as references to your application's project. When you compile your application, you'll see all the assemblies you pulled in via NuGet in the output directory (typically bin\debug
or bin\release
).
The idea here, as Andy says, is that these assemblies are now part of your application just as if you had found the assembly and referenced it manually.
Basically I'm guessing that NuGet and the concept of packages are out of the loop at this stage. Is that right?
Yep. However you plan to ship your application binary is the same way you distribute the assemblies that were "installed" by the NuGet packages. You don't need to distribute the packages, just the assemblies that were referenced by your application.