Well, that actually works. That's what I did to be able to create wheels for modules which use distutils instead of setuptools. 
As it stands, the whole patch can be removed, because I copied what pip does: pip essentially injects the same line into each setup,py just before running `setup.py bdist_wheel`.

https://github.com/Dr-Bean/spksrc/commit/4061317b65474482dfff28e37f374c2710ba69dd#diff-c95dfcd1d9ff0ebea64695b4633e43a5R33

This works for almost every module, although a couple stubborn ones I've seen cannot be converted to wheels: they use an otherwise weird approach in setup.py.
In the meantime, this prevents us from having to manually patch setup,py for every module that still uses distutils.

I'm keeping a bit of a close eye on the development of pip: at some point when the wheel code is refactored, this might be changed.