The Bash man page can often be confusing regarding the terms used there. But your question becomes clear(er) if you read the definition of pipeline:
A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by one of the control operators
|or|&. The format for a pipeline is:[time [-p]] [ ! ] command [ [|⎪|&] command2 ... ]
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/bash.1.html#SHELL_GRAMMAR
In short, a pipeline is either one command with all its parameters, or multiple of them piped into each other. You can combine multiple of these pipelines by the mentioned operators for subsequent (conditional) execution.