I wanted to follow up on this, as I don't think the other replies make it clear as to WHY changing the product and having the description deleted is counter productive for most of our needs.

We have a line item product selection for "estimate". I can write hundreds of line items with an estimate.  When I convert my template on an "estimate" over to a progress invoice, and need to change my product from "estimate" to a status e.g. "work performed", and all of my data instantly gets erased.  This makes my recurring templates completely useless, and I might as well not even bother with a recurring template for estimates with how QBO is currently set up.  A simple implementation of being able to choose preemptively on a checkbox whether I want other input retained, or not, would save me several minutes of data copying/pasting required otherwise.