Personally I think that if you were invested in making a pinball game(s), importing and using a physics library would be the cleanest way. It would be more work up front but it should mostly be a one time thing.
Teleporting the physics simulation ball to a separate location is a nifty idea! That seems like it would work well, as long as the physics simulation doesn't get thrown off with a sudden change in position from manually moving the object.
Also add suggestion to implement/update the physics object and just wait. Box2d collision filtering is a thing that exists after all, we just don't have access to it through the official plugin.
I'm not very familiar with the addon scene but I'm a little surprised there isn't a third party addon that uses an alternate physics library already. I guess physics is probably one of the more complicated things to implement after all.