The original poster wrote "It seams that in Civil 3D my points automatically appear at true elevation".
You can insert the points not at their true elevation the same way you could in LDDT 2004. It won't help with your scaling issue because it still scales the elevation value using the Autocad Scale command.
In the Point display settings on one of the tabs there is a choice for how you want the point entities inserted. True elevation or fixed elevation which you can then set it to insert at Zero or whatever you want. You'll need to set this for each point display style.
When you set this to zero (or some fixed value for all point styles) you then get a horizontal distance when snapping to them using the Autocad "distance" command on the command line.
On a similar subject, I'm confused over why the scale command is able to scale the elevation of the points.
In Land Desktop 2004 you had to update the point database to reflect the coordinate values for the points after you scaled them. The point entities were moved in the drawing and you had to update the coordinate database to reflect the new position of the points in the drawing. This doesn't affect the elevations in 2004 so I assumed Autocad wasn't able to access the Land Desktop information. At least this is how it works for me. We insert our points at zero rather than "true" elevation.
Now moving to 2009 using the Autocad scale command not only do you move the point entities in the drawing but it scales the elevations.
I understand that in 2009 the point information is in the drawing, but I assumed that when you would use the Autocad scale command it would move the point entities in an x,y,z(z=entity location not true elevation) manner rather than a Northing, Easting, Elevation manner? I don't understand how the autocad scale command is able to access the elevation data and why it changes that rather than the z value of the entity itself. Does 2010 do this as well?
C3D 2012 SP1
Win 7 64 Enterprise
Intel Xeon 3.07 Ghz 8GB Ram
NVIDIA Quadro 4000