How can I get the installed GDAL/OGR version from python?

The __version__ property in the osgeo.gdal module is a string that contains the version number

import osgeo.gdal
print osgeo.gdal.__version__

On my ubuntu machine gives:

>> '1.6.3'

gdal.VersionInfo() does what I want:

>>> osgeo.gdal.VersionInfo()
'1604'

This works on both my Windows box and Ubuntu install. gdal.__version__ gives an error on my Windows installation, although it works on my Ubuntu installation:

>>> import osgeo.gdal
>>> print osgeo.gdal.__version__
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '__version__'