Unless a slightly-customized maven is distributed, you'd have to put a ~/.m2/settings.xml in the new-user template that specified your local repository. Which isn't too bad.
Anyone with more than a handful of developers should really be running their own maven repository mirror to shield deployments from external outages. http://nexus.sonatype.org/ is stable and simple to get running.
The fact that the libraries get downloaded to ~/.m2 should be irrelevant in production, because your deployments should happen against a deployment-specific role user, and downloads should be super-fast, because they're all from within your colo.
(all this being said, I haven't touched java and don't miss it at all since switching to Ruby on Rails to write AdGrok, and that's coming from more than 10 years soaking in java).