No mod_php? 14.04 / ondrej php5.6 + ondrej apache2
TLDR
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5.6Long Answer
So I found the solution, which although simple, is not as intuitive as the official php packages.
After adding the apache2 and php PPA's, and installing all the packages, one needs to manually install the libapache2-mod-php5.6 package as well, which adds the php5.6 apache2 module. The confusion is that the default ubuntu php5 packages include this package as part of the install, however the ones from ondrej's PPA do not.
In case anyone wants to know or cares, I was able to solve this by searching through the closed issues on his github repo which is meant to track issues with his PPA's: Issue #266 gave me the clue.