What I don't get is: can you use SFrame without installing the graphlab framework at all? What are the limitations? Is there an example notebook using only SFrame and not graphlab?
Yes, SFrame is a subset of GraphLab Create. SFrame provides the core data structures to work with tabular and graph data at scale on a single machine. In addition, using GraphLab Create allows you to create/use/evaluate machine learning models.
Here is some user guide to get you started: https://dato.com/learn/userguide/sframe/introduction.html Just replace "import graphlab" with "import sframe".