As per this question, I was wondering if there are any plans to be able to use the kubectl tool without installing gcloud?
The use case I have in mind is the same as the one that fellow had: running kubernetes on CoreOS locally via vagrant.
You can definitely use kubectl without gcloud. You can download the latest official Kubernetes release from its releases page on Github, then run kubectl by untarring it and either running ./cluster/kubectl.sh or copying the kubectl binary from platforms/$OS/$ARCHITECTURE/kubectl into your shell's path.
Also, setting up Kubernetes on vagrant can be as simple as running these two commands, which should get everything in place for you:
export KUBERNETES_PROVIDER=vagrant curl -sS https://get.k8s.io | bash