Agreed it's more hassle than it should be, especially if building from source. However the main installation hassle is CUDA and CuDNN I think, not Tensorflow itself
CUDA is always fun to install but NVIDIA does a reasonably good job as long as you remember to remove the system installed nvidia stuff beforehand (otherwise you'll be in a world of pain with a computer that will likely either hang somewhere during the boot process or that will have two conflicting sets of NVIDIA code on it).
For CuDNN I've found a good solution, see below.
Tensorflow itself worked ok once I figured out what all the dependencies were, even so I have not been able to get it to use CUDA yet (it only works with the CPU), which is strange because other CUDA stuff works fine.