they wouldn’t have made a different tool altogether if it was really a 1:1 replacement

Why not? It's 10x faster.

I think it might have some other new features but you don't need to use those.

i doubt one person on the team could be using uv while everyone else sticks to pip

This is exactly what we do at work. There's no way I could convince everyone to switch to uv so I just switch between them based on an environment variable.

It even supports random stuff like pip install --config-settings editable_mode=compat --editable foo which is required for static tooling to work (e.g. Pyright).