console.log is just a function that pipes the process stream to an output.
Note that the following is example code
console.log = function(d) {
process.stdout.write(d + '\n');
};
Piping to process.stdout does exactly the same thing.
http.get(url, function(response) {
response.pipe(process.stdout);
response.on('end', function() {
console.log('finished');
});
});
Note you can also do
process.stdout.write(response);