the issue is, if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself? it is easier from valve's perspective to just allow steam to manage its own updates along with everything else it manages, than to have a rather arbitrary split that gives you no real advantages anyways.
Steam has always been designed on both osx and windows to be a portable folder that you can move around from system to system and run stuff out of wihout worrying about installers and dependancies.
Steam has always been designed on both osx and windows to be a portable folder that you can move around from system to system and run stuff out of wihout worrying about installers and dependancies.