Is there a way to map a column to a <version> property and have the property live inside of a <component>? The schema suggests otherwise, however, I am wondering if anyone knows of a trick to do so.

Not really, but you can create a private property and make it store the value in the component, like this:

never done it myself and can't think of a reason off the top of my head it wouldn't work, but you could create a type that implemented the interface IVersionType