Goblin Squad Member
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I found this as a possible weapon for Monks, eventhough I'd prefer an unarmed possibility as well.
There are literally hundreds of weapons that are historically associated with monks or martial arts. Some of which by no means should be considered monk weapons that can be used in a flurry.
For a brief example, Wah Lum Tam Tui teaches 40 weapons as part of the style.
Imbicatus - it sounds as if you're as passionate about monks as in D&D and PFRPG as I am. That's AWESOME!
There are two issues with the approach that you're advocating. The first is simple. The Developers have said that they're against it. They want everyone to have similar requirements for equipping weapons so everyone is working from the same basis.
The second one is much more important. Having an 'unarmed' monk's weapons be equippable to a slot other than their weapon slot(like in PFRPG right now with the Amulet of Mighty Fists) is that it leads to unarmed monks being WEAKER than everyone else. Sure, monks have lots of cool advantages, but as far as damage output goes, they are significantly weaker than other melee classes. It also causes balancing headaches for the game developers, since unarmed monks follow different rules than everyone else in the game. Saying that it works that way 'traditionally' in the game isn't really a great reason to continue doing something the same way. The current system is not well balanced against other classes. Characters will be limited by the number of 'weapon slots' anyway. They'll also be able to swap between them with the press of a hotkey. So going between unarmed attacks and attacks with a monk special weapon is already set up in the game, and should be as quick and fluid as you could want.
I'd much rather them work on things like Style Feats, Combat Maneuver feats and other interesting things(like Qinggong monk powers and special monk only keywords!!!) that simulate cool martial arts skill and powers than having them have to spend a bunch of extra time balancing something that is innately unbalanced.
Honestly, I'd love if the system from the tabletop was transferred directly over in many ways. This would cause a lot of problems with many of their core game concepts. Instead of spending a lot of energy trying to get them to change to something that is antithetical to their crafting, pvp, and resource management systems I'd prefer to try to make sure they do unarmed monks in a way that blows away the treatment they've gotten in other games.
I really don't want another video game with monks from the D&D setting that have almost no real interesting options. This is one of the places that Pathfinder's d20 game blows all other versions away. Let's work on getting as much of that awesomeness translated to PFO as we can!