By default, get_posts only returns posts of type ‘post’

The WordPress project I work on uses a custom post type of ‘Product’ because we use WordPress as an ecommerce solution. I was trying to get a list of those products, but get_posts refused to display them. After consulting the Codex entry for get_posts, I found that by default, get_posts only shows the posts with type ‘post’. My solution was to use this query:

    get_posts('post_type=product');