I am using the flattenCombine mel script exclusively for a couple of years already. Never ever use the native combine of Maya, I still can't begin to guess why they left it like it is. This script was posted on the area a while back here: http://area.autodesk.com/downloads/scripts/flattencombinemel but I am sure there's a…
Yeah, I wrote a script at work which does this (it's not too hard) because it was driving me mad too, I'll see if I can dig it up or rewrite it and release it.
Yeah I was going to say parent is really the only way to save the pivot point of the original mesh. Unless you wrote a .mel script that combines and then centers the pivot point at the centerpoint of the original mesh.