On my magento site we have the requirement to sort the product listings by 2 attributes, 'Manufacturer', 'Name' and then falling back to the Unique and default attribute 'Entity ID'.
Seems magento only lets you order by 1 then entity_id. I dont mind having to do this in a hacky way if required.
Looking around a few people have the problem but no one seems to offer an answer so thought I'd give this ago ( First question too, had to be a toughie :) ).