I found this:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/opencv-python
OpenCV on wheels
'Unofficial OpenCV packages for Python.'
Installation was painless for Ubuntu 16.04
pip3 install opencv-python
Check the installation
python3
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cv2
>>> cv2.__version__
'3.2.0'
Not sure why this wasn't mentioned. Perhaps it is newly available?