The answer to question 1 is to turn off interactive creation which you can find near the bottom of the create menu when creating polygons or nurbs

ie create/ Polygon Primatives or Create / nurbs Primatives.

The primative will then appear at the origin with a scale of 1.


I am not exactly sure what you mean by question 2 but if you turn on your channel box by going to Display/UI Elements and checkmarking Channel box/ layer Editor, after you select an object and hit the R key to bring up your scale manipulator you can add the values you want in the channel box manually or watch the scale values while scaling with the manipulator.

hope this helps regards J.S.