About vertical table alignment (relative to the baseline):
Is there a reason why we do not natively support [pos] in\begin{tabular}[pos]{cols} ??? This should be an option in the table settings dialog.
What is described in 2.10 of the Embedded Objects Manual (putting the table in a raisebox in a minipage) is a really ugly hack for something as simple as this.
See <http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/teTeX/latex/latex2e-html/ltx-68.html> /Konrad
