As Unity’s scene view resembles 3D editors, I was expecting an analogue of move and clone functionality in 3ds Max. There you can hold Ctrl and move object with move gizmo and the object is cloned. As far as I can tell, the only way to do the same in Unity is to press Ctrl-D and then move an object (which is not as convenient when you need to duplicate and position a lot of stuff).
Unfortunately this is the best way, just Ctrl+D and then use the handles to move the object wherever you would like. I know it’s not really what you were looking for but that is the only way of doing as far as I know.
Ultimate necro post but as I still did not find a way to do this I wrote a script. It’s for Odin Inspector but can probably be altered to work without Odin relatively easily, for example by making it a menu entry only instead of a dialogue. This will allow to create copies of objects and move them by an offset. unity-editor-scripts/CloneAndMove.cs at trunk · WildRikku/unity-editor-scripts · GitHub