Pixel packed texture source
The question is: is there a way to pass this type of texture to glTexImage2D as-is?


Yes; you can just pass it as-is, but (looking at the docs) it is not supported directly.  You'll need a custom shader to interpret it.

Depending on your needs, expanding the pixels first (or even doing the full conversion CPU-side) may be worthwhile.  At a guess, I'd say that expanding the pixels (as you copy from the camera's driver buffer into a staging buffer for upload to the GPU) is a pretty consistently good idea, unless you're extremely bandwidth-saturated.  I'd add the color-space conversion for easier debugging, or if the image doesn't update frequently.