Yeah, about the only major problem with it is you can't hand two of them for a friend to equip his pet. Your best bet is to have the friend get a pet up and you equip it yourself (which is usually what I do when a friend wants pet toys anyways).
I'm not sure about the cleric hammers either. Do they have a no-drop tag on them? If so, pets were made to not equip no-drop items quite some time ago. I remember one item that used to be nice for pets was the Seru sword that's not equippable by anyone, but pets used to weild it just fine. Pets equipped with that would kill stuff quite well from what I hear. Too bad I got my Seru sword after this was nerfed.
So far, only the one slow stick has been nerfed, but pets can still equip several others. I haven't used any slow sticks yet, because I just don't care to have to rely on a proc to do my killing. Plus most of the things I solo like Murkglider caves, I can kill that stuff without the use of any slow anyways.