After digging endlessly this night I finally found the solution. The short answer is that you can use the disks' GUIDs (which persist even after disconnecting a drive) with the zpool command.

Long answer:
I got the disk's GUID using the zdb command which gave me the following output

root@zeus:/dev# zdb

hermes:

    version: 28

    name: 'hermes'

    state: 0

    txg: 162804

    pool_guid: 14829240649900366534

    hostname: 'zeus'

    vdev_children: 1

    vdev_tree:

        type: 'root'

        id: 0

        guid: 14829240649900366534

        children[0]:

            type: 'raidz'

            id: 0

            guid: 5355850150368902284

            nparity: 1

            metaslab_array: 31

            metaslab_shift: 32

            ashift: 9

            asize: 791588896768

            is_log: 0

            create_txg: 4

            children[0]:

                type: 'disk'

                id: 0

                guid: 11426107064765252810

                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP-part2'

                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/73b31683-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'

                whole_disk: 1

                create_txg: 4

            children[1]:

                type: 'disk'

                id: 1

                guid: 15935140517898495532

                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X-part2'

                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/746c949a-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'

                whole_disk: 1

                create_txg: 4

            children[2]:

                type: 'disk'

                id: 2

                guid: 7183706725091321492

                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS-part2'

                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/7541115a-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'

                whole_disk: 1

                create_txg: 4

            children[3]:

                type: 'disk'

                id: 3

                guid: 17196042497722925662

                path: '/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C-part2'

                phys_path: '/dev/gptid/760a94ee-537f-11e2-bad7-50465d4eb8b0'

                whole_disk: 1

                create_txg: 4

    features_for_read:

The GUID I was looking for is 15935140517898495532 which enabled me to do

root@zeus:/dev# zpool offline hermes 15935140517898495532

root@zeus:/dev# zpool status

  pool: hermes

 state: DEGRADED

status: One or more devices has been taken offline by the administrator.

        Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a

        degraded state.

action: Online the device using 'zpool online' or replace the device with

        'zpool replace'.

  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 2h4m with 0 errors on Sun Jun  9 00:28:24 2013

config:



        NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

        hermes                       DEGRADED     0     0     0

          raidz1-0                   DEGRADED     0     0     0

            ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP  ONLINE       0     0     0

            ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X  OFFLINE      0     0     0

            ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS  ONLINE       0     0     0

            ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

and then

root@zeus:/dev# zpool replace hermes 15935140517898495532 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500320AS_9QM03ATQ

root@zeus:/dev# zpool status

  pool: hermes

 state: DEGRADED

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will

        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

action: Wait for the resilver to complete.

  scan: resilver in progress since Sun Jun  9 01:44:36 2013

    408M scanned out of 419G at 20,4M/s, 5h50m to go

    101M resilvered, 0,10% done

config:



        NAME                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

        hermes                          DEGRADED     0     0     0

          raidz1-0                      DEGRADED     0     0     0

            ata-ST3300620A_5QF0MJFP     ONLINE       0     0     0

            replacing-1                 OFFLINE      0     0     0

              ata-ST3300831A_5NF0552X   OFFLINE      0     0     0

              ata-ST3500320AS_9QM03ATQ  ONLINE       0     0     0  (resilvering)

            ata-ST3200822A_5LJ1CHMS     ONLINE       0     0     0

            ata-ST3200822A_3LJ0189C     ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

After resilvering had been completed everything worked well again. It would have been nice to include this information, that you can use a disk's GUID obtained through zdb with the zpool command, with the manpage of zpool.

Edit

As pointed out by durval below the zdb command may not output anything. Then you may try to use

zdb -l /dev/<name-of-device>

to explicitly list information about the device (even if it already is missing from the system).