"Actually, Illustrator does allow for scaling and rotating from selection mode without using those special tools. But the dedicated tools allow setting the origin point which you can't do using the quick bounding box grips."

Yes, Michael, that's what I was talking about - setting the origin point is an important feature to me for a function like this.

I have Corel X3 I have to reinstall it (not sure if I have it installed in my new desktop yet) - trying Fireworks just now, I love how they have it setup; draw an object, hit ctrl-t and the typical bounding box manipulator appears with the 8 handles in their usual positions (the pivot is in the center of the box)

You can immediately grab the pivot and move it around anywhere within or outside the bounding box. The nice thing is, if you move the pivot to any of the 8 bounding box handles, it snaps to the box for precise positioning.

If you dbl-click the pivot, it snaps back to the center of the bounding box...

Move the cursor exactly over one of the bbox squares and you get the stretch cursor, (scale for corners) move anywhere else around the bbox and you get the rotate cursor.

Holding the down ALT key causes the stretch or scale to happen from the center (the pivot is immediately moved back to the center of the bbox)

-Will