I am guessing it would also download the correct package for the version of node which meteor is bundled with…
For example you might be running node 6 locally, but this would download the npm package which works with 0.10.XX
Is that right?
Check out this comment on MeteorChef’s announcement for their new Base boilerplate, which is now following the 1.3 guide as well.
They had issues when trying to install that boilerplate on different machines and it turned out the npm version was the problem (pulling different versions of dependencies). They decided to only use meteor npm as a matter of convention.