If you upload the zip file to your google drive, you should be able to "open" it. When you do, you are presented with a list of files in the zip package. I am not sure what would happen if you took the image and copied it to an sd card or usb stick (e.g. will it decompress it?).
I believe dd is available in the shell if you are in developer mode, so that is how you write the image to disk..