When I need to rotate a brush several times, I pull the brush palette from the dock and click on the Brush Tip Shape. Just drag the arrow around the circle to whatever angle and see the preview of the brush at the same time. 

It's easier to use the space bar as a temporary hand tool to move around your image. When you release the space bar the tool you were using before is still selected. One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts.

And back to the Transform Selection , i'm lazy. Yes, you can put in pixels instead of percent and you can position it where ever you want including moving from a relative position. You can angle, rotate and skew. But say you have 1 square of an unknown size and you want to evenly expand the selection of this square by say 5px on each side.  You would have to link W to H and add 10px to width or height of square. Once you have clicked Transform Selection you can't click on Info palette (if it wasn't already open) to see what size was to add the 10px to. I'm just saying it would be so much simplier for a lazy person to Select > Modify > Expand 5px without getting the stupid cut off corners.