As you know, pillars are like grains, with a key difference: grains are defined on the Minion, whereas pillars are defined for individual Minions, from the Master.
As far as users are concerned, there's not a whole lot of difference here, except that pillars must be mapped to targets on the Master, using the top.sls file in pillar_roots. One such mapping might look like this:
# cat /srv/pillar/top.sls base: '*': - test
In this example, we would have a pillar called test defined, which might look like this:
# cat /srv/pillar/test.sls test_pillar: True
Dynamic pillars are still mapped in the top.sls file, but that's where the similarities end, so far as configuration is concerned.