The table drag enabled controls are currently at a per entity type level and determined by the handler. This makes it quite difficult if you are making use of an entity provided by another module (e.g. commerce order items). It should be possible for widgets to change this behaviour, so custom widgets have the control.
Allow a #tabledrag option in the element which allows a widget (or potentially form alter etc) to disable the table drag.
Addition of an element key to give additional flexibility.
Needs review
1.0
Code
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I've been trying this out with an implementation that uses IEF Table View Mode and so far it's working well. Much more concise and reliable than patching IEF to remove the sort elements. I'm not going to RTBC it until we test and deploy it, but this looks really promising.
We're now using this in a production deployment and are happy with the way it's been working.