Product catalog site (+ Store) - what strategy?
Drupal commerce is not your only bet for a shopping site for Drupal 7, but it is the best one.

At this time of writing commerce is on beta-4 but it wont be long before rc-1 will be released. It's very stable considering that it's a beta release, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Talking about personal experience I have launched one site on commerce, which was launched when commerce was still in alpha, most likely the first production on commerce. So I have a good firsthand experience with running commerce in a production environment. Other than the pain of having to do my own upgradings from alpha to beta, commerce has been running very stable without any major problems so far.

Taking into account the above. I would personally go with option a):


Install commerce
Create products
Create nodes with products reference to display the data
Don't display add to cart form anywhere.


You might need to use a bit of time to setup commerce and products types, but it would allow you to quickly and easily convert the catalog to an actual shop and that save you a lot of headaches later on.