How does this distribution play with the outside world? Will I be able to install other third party libraries into the distribution? Does it have its own 'installation procedure'?
So, we ship anaconda with our own package management system, called conda. Conda is open source and was created because for scientific python, we need to manage versions of non-python libraries (blas/atlas/mkl,libhdf5, etc..). But you don't need to use conda if you don't want to. Conda is just what we use to install stuff. You can use pip on top of Anaconda if you would like, and we even have functions to turn whatever you did to your anaconda environment into a conda package if you wanted to.