My products categories have (meta)data - Use taxonomies or implement them as content items?

I'd like to use the combo Drupal/CCK/Views to create a products catalog and I'm confused as to if I need to use taxonomies or not.

My products could have a taxonomy, but each term in the taxonomy has information by itself. For example a product category might include pictures, text and links.

As far as I can see, if I try to implement my categories as a taxonomy I can't add this data to each term. Therefore I think I have to create a content item for every category, that has the extra data as attributes and has its products (or subcategories) as node references.

Category_1 <-----------------(there is text and images that describe it)
|-- Category_1.1                              -//-
|    |-- Category_1.1.1                       -//-
|    |   |-- Product_A
|    |   |-- Product_B
|    |   |-- Product_C
Category_2
.....

Is this the best approach?

Use nodes for it, not a taxonomy, and link via nodereference