tamte
It's not technically a problem in Houdini, you just need a tool with a state that does the conversion

and I think Edit SOP would be a good node to include such options

Since how it works in other apps it's just values entered in a tool state that get applied to whatever the final object space coordinates are, to avoid creating any live dependency which would not be desirable for adhoc editing of a geo

I think everything that would actually need a dependency can be solved in other ways. I am just looking for a quick way to push a point or a group of point to a specific value in space. If I could even do that across multiple objects (without merging them first), that would change life for me in Houdini.
I think ( again) of a set of imported geometry spread over different hierarchies for example. If I could just grab some points of multiple objects and do a simple point transform, that would be great.
If there was a way to automatically create nodes in a node tree at user defined insert points so they could be created from the object level for a selection of objects.... But I'm probably dreaming a bit there....

Well coming from Softimage too I'm also surprised it's so complicated to set global point positions in Houdini.
Adding some nodes is not at all straight forward, it would be such a slow workflow.
What would be great : being able to edit the geometry spreadsheet values.

I ran into this issue as well, and I thought I could just edit the point positions in the geometry spreadsheet. But as already pointed out, that strangely enough didn’t work because the edits are not saved.

I contacted support about this, but also no solution there.

In case anyone needs to edit points with the geometry spreadsheet that way I figured two hacks that seem to work so far.

One is to duplicate the mesh, edit the points of the copy any way you want, and then manually snap the points of the original to those points with the edit sop. You can then delete the copy.

The other is to duplicate the mesh, edit the copy with the spreadsheet, then lock the edited copy and use a blendshape sop to match the points of the original. It seems less safe to me because the edited point positions only stick as long as the mesh is locked, but seems to work as well.

Maybe this helps if someone runs into this issue as well, but how nice would it be if SideFX would finally fix fairly basic stuff like this.