We had some issues early on getting some people set up on this with older versions of the platform already in place and felt it was more prudent at the time to just do this directly. Personally I put an alias in my bash profile to implement the same functionality. I would probably feel a little uncomfortable moving back to workon for primarily internal reasons unless there were a test here that caught potential issues. 

We're probably going to start moving further in the direction of getting rid of older things like this in favour of more closely following the present state of virtual env and it's probably a good idea to change this as a part of that.