Enable root account in Ubuntu?

After my recent experience with broken su and sudo commands in a failed system upgrade, I realized that although disabling the root account has many advantages, one of the disadvantage is that I can't login as root in the terminal when I'm physically in front of the system. This is a major issue if su, sudo, and passwd binaries are broken somehow. Luckily, chroot was there to the rescue for me. Now, I contemplate whether I should enable the root account on my systems…