First, thank you all for all your help.
Hmmm.. I guess I just see the localized name as being "more friendly". Users would only need to put the name they see in game in the config to get it working, without having to dig around for what it's named in code. But you do bring up a good point about it making the mod breakable.
I went ahead and set it up to use GameRegistry.findItem but findItem requires the modid. I added modid to the table in the config but now my nice clean config is looking less and less user friendly. But it works.
I there no way to build a HashMap of all the available items in game? I was using Item.itemlist in 1.6.4 but I need to find an alternative for 1.7.10