Are there any sort of configuration options for specifying the default save location for gnome-screenshot, or is this hard-coded into the source code?

It used to be ~/Desktop, which seems to have changed to ~/Pictures (in 12.04).

The only possible solution I've seen is about Setting the default name (as it includes time stamp information now instead of simply Screenshot#), but that solution doesn't really seem ideal to me.

Also, this post suggested that the last save location is remembered the next time you take a screenshot, but in my experience, this doesn't seem to be the case. And in any case, following on from that, that entry in gconf-editor doesn't even seem to accurately reflect the last location, so more than likely an entry related to an older version of gnome-screenshot.