Is there anything wrong w giving a node a status other than 0 or 1?
I would keep $node-&gt;status to 0 or 1 doing a grep in a couple of installs there are some explicit checks for it. (not in core but in contrib). While there is nothing to stop you, you won't guarantee that things will work with it.

You can create your own field which represents another status and use that for your own needs.