I installed pyside and a version of the Qt Components (see this blog ) on my computer (running Ubuntu, not sure about other platforms), so I could test directly on the desktop (it doesn't look quite the same, but testing the interaction between QML and python was easy enough this way).

Later, I moved the project into the Qt SDK (mainly to create the part that uses the synchronization framework which needs to be in C++), and added a few lines in the .proj file to deploy the python files. So I let the Qt SDK create the package and deploy to the device.