Setting up unit testing in Ionic 2 definitely requires a bit of grunt work at the start, but I’ve found creating automated tests in Ionic 2 works well. Angular has been built with testing in mind.
I have pretty heavily documented the steps I’ve taken, in this tutorial series especially: https://www.joshmorony.com/test-driven-development-in-ionic-2-an-introduction-to-tdd/ which goes beyond simple 2+2=4 style unit tests.