Yeh there's few workarounds.
Your entries field is close to what Nathanial from P&T mentioned on the issue tracker:
If you create a global set and add a custom product field. Then select all the products. This gives you the ability to drag and drop the order of the products. You can use this in conjunction with the on save event and catch the save of new products and programmatically add them to the field mentioned above.
If you filter by category, you won't have to create a field for every category however it's definitely still a workaround.
One other option would be to sort based on some other criteria that's always around, such as date created or modified.
If you want something to float to top or bottom, just remove the post date (so Craft will make the product the current date and time) or resave the product (to change the modification date). Depending on how you sort that could be a quick way to move products to the top for example.
Make sure you chime in on that issue on the tracker to give it more attention.
