Ah yeah, that's nothing like what I thought you meant. That said, if I wanted to do something like that in Gimp, I'd just cut-paste - this creates a temporary layer with the content positioned exactly where it was before, where you can use the standard layer manipulation tools to transform it. You can then use either the "new layer" button to promote it fully, or "anchor" to paste it back onto the original.
It's pretty much an all-in-one toolbox of most anything you'd want to do with a selection, and I could never find a good equivalent of that in GIMP.
Regarding the handles in GIMP - last I tried them, they resized the selection region, rather than the underlying image, which was immensely frustrating.