PD to me is the world of workarounds ;-)
while i also used to be a little irritated by this copy behaviour, i almost automatically do it like Roman these days (the "duplicate" method).
another possibility is to copy what you want, do a "select all" afterwards, then "shift+right" to move everything 10 pixels to the right and THEN do the pasting.
probably even better: copy, paste, and immediately after pasting press shift-down to move the pasted content 10 pixels down
while i also think pasting should happen in a better way, in my daily patching life it really became a very very minor issue - whereas ...
This gets particularly frustrating if you copy/paste a big bunch of objects at once, and then do something else before realising, and can't access the undo function any more.
... the fact that there is only one (!) undo step is the much more serious issue !
@miller: could this be upgraded in the next release ? ;-)
best
oliver