Center pivot was not made to make the coordinates of your object change, but to make the pivot of your geometry appear at the center of your geometry. Like Babyduck said - it would be crazy if the coordinates were always changing. If you group an object to another object, the child object will lose its world coordinate and will move according to where its parent is. It absolutely has to be this way, otherwise we would have an emense amount of trouble driving that object with expressions and the like because it has to move according to where the parent object is.

The thing to remember is that center pivot has only one use and it does what it's supposed to well. Messing with coordinates requires you to use other tools specifically designed to modify coordinates. Alias|Wavefront purposly made two seperate tools for each so users could have more flexibility.

The routine I explained above is not really "a crazy work around" because it can be done in mere seconds. It's not that difficult to do in my opinion.

and... I'm sorry if I came across as being a little harsh in this post, but you really shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly. Be patient.