A link on the original announcement page states "Moving forward, you can simply think of ASP.NET Core as being part of .NET Core.". If this is right the high coupling between the CLR and what really is a framework/library on top astounds me and is somewhat worrying. I'm foreseeing future deployment horrors. One of the advantages of .NET is portable IL code across anything that can interpret it similar to Java. If this is broken and I can only use .NET/ASP.NET Core CLR with certain native system dependencies installed then this big advantage of the .NET platform IMO is gone and creates some surprising non-intuitive issues.

You can see one example of this in the issue here: https://github.com/aspnet/AspNetCore/issues/3307. I install the package; then also need to install a system wide package using my package manager to back it? If I install the package I should be able to use it. It seems as if the GAC is back just for ASP.NET however? Unfortunately as I experienced recently installing the right asp net runtime doesn't necessarily fix the problem either; it just allows the app to start but then other run-time issues pop up. The only fix is self-containing the app - tough luck if your on a distro not supported. Maybe these are teething issues but the constant change between minor versions has been painful.

ASP.NET is no longer just another Nuget library it seems - it's now been promoted to be part of the CLR and this decision is the logical extension of that.