Hi,
With the use of the micro controller being so popular these days, the piezo elements are more common and yes you need a pulsed wave to drive them, but the advantage is you have a more wide range of frequencies to choose from as you can change the frequency of your oscillator or uC output pin to indicate different things like modes or different errors, etc.
If you have trouble obtaining a ready made buzzer, you can always resort to using a single 555 chip with a regular piezo element type buzzer and set the frequency to some reasonable value. You can even add a parallel resistor somewhere to get the frequency to change to a different value, or even input a voltage to the "control voltage" pin on the 555. This all would not be too difficult to do and would not take up much space especially if you can use an SMD part.