Description of problem: It can't really work without the daemon present. (Similarly for pavucontrol, pavumeter. I can file separate bugs if you want.)
Actually, they do as you can use them with a daemon on the network.
They may be able to work, but the menu entries die horribly by default.
Not sure what you mean. It's supposed to be empty until it can find a server (through zeroconf).
Whoops, padevchooser does something reasonably OK. Fixing component. Without pulseaudio installed, pavumeter and pavucontrol simply pop up a: Connection failed: Connection refused dialog, and exit.
A bit of an upstream bug. Adding Lennart as cc since these GUI apps are his babies.
As Pierre correctly mentioned, they work fine across the network. Hence no need for a depends line. Nowadays the GUI tools should be showing a proper dialog bugs before they die. I am thus closing this bug now.