Has anybody ever able to deploy qt application?

[squidge]

Hm. But isn't the whole point of the Qt Creator IDE to give me a Qt-aware development environment so I don't have to purchase and muck about with Visual Studio? And if you need third party utilities to build release versions of Qt applications, shouldn't this be spelled out in the "How to deploy at Qt app" document?

You don't need Visual Studio, you only need it if you want to use nmake. GCC is perfectly capable on its own if you don't want to use Visual Studio.

Now, though, both "qmake -config debug" and "qmake -config release" both return instantly without actually, you know, building anything.

qmake builds makefiles, it doesn't build anything else. You need to use your favourite make application to actually do the building. Eg. mingw32-make, or nmake.

Alternatively, you can just use the QtCreator IDE to do all this for you, and then copy the generated exe and appropriate dlls to your distribution directory, then pack up that dir and distribute.