this is a discussion that we had a while ago (@ericf and myself), on whether or not the examples should be installable (npm i) to fulfill the dependencies before you run it. we have to options:

a) rely on the actual module pkg depedencies and the module itself in dev mode (which is what you have here)
b) rely on pkg.json to install from npm directly all dependencies

while b) is better for people to understand and most important, Copy/Paste in their app, it is more difficult for contributors and author to test the modified code, in which case we will have to link the module, and do all kind of tricks just to get it to work, but I feel that since we are experts, that's not a big deal, the big deal comes for the functional tests, which we don't have yet, in which case travis should be able to install from local in order to test the new code (or we can have a custom script).

anyway, I think both options are valid, just make sure that at least package.json is in place so they can get a reference of what they need to have in their app, even if you don't really use it for the example.