Question about developing internationalized theme

I was planning on internationalizing a theme. I was a little confused about the final steps of creating the .pot, .po and .mo files. Most of the tutorials I read describe the process for creating all three but when I look at twentythirteen (or twelve or eleven) the /languages directory only has the POT file.

When creating a theme for general distribution, would I just generate the .pot file with the .po and .mo left to the user who downloads and installs my theme?