Maybe we could use publication impact of the work done as a measure instead, it would be as arbitrary as 'real work'?
Production is IMHO about infrastructure that enables you to do something, i.e. its dependable. E.g. cars/busses/planes form part of a production transport infrastructure. Different users of an infrastructure will have different metrics that define their success. A transport infrastructure is only useful to me if it gets me where I want to go.
I do not think that the publication impact is a good metric. A research/academic infrastructure used only, e.g., for testing and developing new programming models and/or technologies related to grid computing will surely have a large publication impact, as it will be used to try out new paradigms which will be subject to many publications. But not for this reason I would qualify such infrastructure as "production".
What about the 'Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson' metric? That seems to be a publication metric I hear about a lot! Seems a bit focussed, and hardly generic, but seems to work well for some communities! Steven