wheel is quite prevalent nowadays. ensurepip even uses wheels of pip & setuptools itself. Installing wheel by default will bestow the following benefits:

1. pip's wheel cache will be enabled by default.
2. Users will be able to run setup.py bdist_wheel. Put simply, they will be able to build wheels.
3. Users will have access to the wheel command by default.

All those benefits will also apply in any created venv (Via the standard venv package). The external virtualenv package already does this https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/tree/master/virtualenv_support. I often find myself installing wheel manually in any venv I create.

It shouldn't be too difficult to do, but it probably needs some agreement before being done.