Status as a field

I find it odd that this isn't already implemented but I need to display in Views-generated table the "published/not published" status of my nodes. I'd like to act exactly like it does in Administer -> Content management -> Content (admin/content/node). I've already created a patch that, seems, to do what I'm after. I wasn't sure if the same thing could be done in a separate module using hook_views_tables or something similar.