So it seems like what bash needs and what zsh needs are pretty different. My feeling so far is that if there isn't "one true format" that argparse can produce and be useful to a wide variety of shells, then it's probably not functionality that belongs in Python core, and instead belongs on PyPI.

So I guess my recommended next step would be to have someone offer help to the maintainer of http://pypi.python.org/pypi/optcomplete to update it to support argparse as well. If and when optcomplete supports argparse, bash, zsh and whatever other common shells people are using, and when optcomplete has significant usage in the field, then we can consider integrating it into the Python stdlib.