It does persist during a session (on the Mac anyway, not sure about Windows) but not from one session to the next. There's no way around this either as far as I know.
It would be nice to have printer presets like InDesign, but I think that is a rather big deal to implement.
Printer drivers have come a long way since the early days of the Chooser, and (in DOS) of having to buy a special program to print (called Sideways) to print landscape orientation. But they still have a long way to go.