Description of problem: kvm doesn't Require the qemu package, and so a yum install kvm doesn't pull qemu onto the system. This results in confusion for the end user - see BZ #248305 for example. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kvm-24-1
Ummm, there's no requirement at all from kvm on qemu anymore. In the past, it was required for keymaps and BIOSen, but kvm has its own copy these days due to needing a fix in the video BIOS beyond released qemu. I don't know what virt-manager is doing and without details, I don't really want to be pulling in all of qemu.
It is not a direct requirement of virt-manager per se. Its actually an artifact of the way libvirt support for KVM is implemented. The KVM code is just one variant of the more generic QEMU support, and this requires presence of the QEMU binary. So, at this time, to provision KVM guests requires that QEMU also be installed. I don't see any big issue with the KVM RPM depending on the QEMU rpm since the AFAIK, the upstream intention is still that KVM will ultimately merge with main QEMU codebase, being just a '--kvm' flag to the main 'qemu' binary.
That's a bug in libvirt then. Although the long-term may be that kvm gets merged, it's not the case now. So libvirt should be checking for the existence of qemu-kvm to know whether or not kvm is available. Hacking around it in packaging is entirely the wrong answer.
This issue is fixed in libvirt-0.3.3. It is now possible to launch KVM guests without having QEMU installed.