Aperture 3.5 Raw Image Processing

No the Raw file is separate and not affected by the camera settings. Aperture does not take the camera settings into account when doing the conversion.

If having the camera settings is important either shoot JPG or else use the manufactures software which in most cases will use those settings.

Not permanently, no.

You can tell Aperture to use the in-camera JPEG while importing and then leave quick preview on, but you can't edit those images. Aperture needs to process the images.

That's the problem, though. The settings the camera manufacturer uses are totally proprietary. Apple doesn't have access to them.

The best Apple could do would be to take 10,000 raw files, then take 10,000 processed JPEGs for the camera manufacturer, and try to figure out how it worked.... bleh.

Adobe actually HAS done a lot of this with Lightroom with the presets you can choose (i.e. camera landscape, versus adobe standard).

Images that are too flat are fairly easy to deal with though. If you want a little punchier images out of Aperture why not try the built-in "Auto Enhance" preset and apply it when you import? It's trivially easy to apply a preset on import.