There were plenty of luxury goods and tools that would have been useful to many people in China at the time, the problem was that either those potential customers could not afford to buy them, or that they were not allowed to.
In the first category would be things like steam pumps and steel tools. A steam pump would be fantastically useful to a mine owner, but the cost of transporting more than a few such machines 2/3 the way across the world would make them prohibitive. Steel tools produced in Sheffield and other British industrial centers were cheaper, and probably of higher quality than those produced domestically in China, but the workmen who would actually be able to use them would never be able to afford them.
In the second category would be firearms. It would not be prohibitively expensive to export rifled muskets and light artillery pieces from Great Britain to China. However, the Imperial Court had little interest in buying such weapons, due to the decentralized organization of their military, but also, more importantly, the destabilizing effect on Chinese society such imports would conceivably have. This was unfortunate from the long term, because the Chinese could produce gunpowder, so the importation of muskets could have quickly stimulated a local industry.
Opium was in many ways an ideal commodity for the British to trade the Chinese. Rather than transporting goods directly to China, English merchants could instead, using the same ships, transport and sell goods in India, and use some of the profits to buy opium, which they could then transport to the Chinese on the same ships. Both the physical capital (the ships) and the owners investment capital were used more efficiently by first selling to the Indians and then to the Chinese.
This could also have functioned with other goods produced in India that were in demand in China. The problem was that, in a pre-industrial China, there was simply very little produced in India that was in demand in China. Tea and ceramics were produced in India and used in China, but the Chinese domestic production was sufficient to meet local demand. Luxury textile goods faced the same problem.
The only real alternative to Opium would have to be some kind of light, easily transportable good such as spice that could cultivated in India and that was in demand in China. However, even if such a spice existed, the Quing Emperors probably would have opposed it as soon as they realized that an unfavorable balance of trade meant an outflow of China's gold and silver, something they viewed as unacceptable. Any attempt to restrict trade between the British Merchants and the China would likely precipitate an intervention, or a war by the British/French.