You could solve that problem by not using Ubuntu: SmartOS, Debian, and OS X all have perfectly functional Python 3 packages. (as I'm sure many distributions and operating systems do)
This has very little to do with Python 3.
This has very little to do with Python 3.
All in all it's quite okay, and definitely on the right path.
The Ubuntu release in question was the LTS Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a snapshot of Debian unstable, and it's not surprising that shipping cutting edge packages results in a few that are broken.
Which is the point of the article and P3's biggest problem: All the things surrounding it.
The people behind Python seems desperate to push everybody to Python 3, mostly by telling people how much better Python 3 is than Python 2. But the thing is, that doesn't matter when the environment surrounding Python 3 is considerably worse than for Python 2.