That's right, Steven, the controller doesn't care. But no, it is not commonplace among professional designers to swap data lines to simplify board design.
Steve, when I do commercial projects I have the luxury of having double sided PCB's made. When I do one-off projects, I make the PCB myself, always single sided. You can get an 8052 design with external memory on a single sided PCB, no links, all address and data signals connected properly.