Ability to place comment_render elsewhere

I find it very limiting to have to have comments render automatically inside the node.tpl.php rather than being able to choose where to place them in any template. There is a thread with some solutions but non of them appear to work without hacking the node module to disable the automatic rendering of comments.

I'm not sure of the best way to go about this so I haven't submitted a patch, but I think advanced themers would find this feature useful. The code I'm using to render the comments elsewhere is:

<?php
if (function_exists('comment_render') && $node->comment) {
   print comment_render($node, $node->cid);
   $node->comment = NULL;
}
?>

This only works for me if I comment out the comment_render code in node.module and set the comments to display at the bottom of nodes rather than on a separate page. A more 'upgrade friendly' solution would be excellent. Any takers?