It's very common for customers to request placeholder text for the Product Search plugin. To facilitate this we remove the plugin and replace it with some hand rolled HTML. Of course this is open to trouble as we end up hard coding menuid's etc.
If we could have a checkbox on the plugin for 'Show placeholder text' and a text box for 'Placeholder text' I think that would be enough?
This sounds like a good idea and something quite simple to implement.