Hi peyton,
To make your experience with our components as painless as possible, we need to incorporate them in your development environment. There are registry entries, common files shared among our different products, documentation that needs to be installed and configured on the workstation.
You can of course copy the DLLs that you need on a shared drive and use them on the other development machines but you will have to integrate them yourself. Depending on which products your are working with (ActiveX or .NET), you might have some licensing issues, documentation will not be integrated (in case of .NET, you will not be able to even start the documentation without installing the package. ActiveX's documentation can be started by opening the .chm)
To make a long story short, the installer is not mandatory but it is strongly recommended to avoid painful workstation configuration.