Thanks John for the link.

This is indeed a very important topic for Enterprise deployments.
In Zebra, working closely with Google and the EMM vendors, we're putting in places all the pieces to simplify this migration for the newer Android releases.

We've at least a couple of blogs on this website relevant to the argument:

In particular, on Device Owner, we've added in Mx (just in time for the release of our Nougat based devices) the capability to stage one application as the Device Owner:

Intent - Zebra Technologies TechDocs  : EnrollDeviceOwner Sends an Intent to enroll the Device Owner (specified using Package and Class parameters) for provisioning and device management. Useful for bypassing the Android Setup Wizard and GMS welcome screens; also works with non-GMS devices.

Everybody can starts to do some tests, using this functionality, with Google's TestDPC: GitHub - googlesamples/android-testdpc
Again, we've a blog on this website that cover some of the features enabled by a Device Owner:

Ciao
~Pietro