Marketing automation on changed Order status

There is no workflow or automated process for this as of yet. So you'd have to create a global handler to do this work for you. I just went through this for a client a month or two ago.

There is no way to abuse the marketing automation application to do this? like the abandoned cart emails?

An abandon cart is not an order. I've not found any marketing automation task which will do this, hence the custom global handler.