This has been answered before at Import Settings. Well, it's been addressed anyway - no-one seems to know why it's like that...

However, you can set the Scale to 1.0, and do your Maya models however you want. It's just per-model, no way to change it permanently.

It's not like that for all apps. For example, everything from Blender comes in at 1.0 by default (unless you manually export to .fbx). Which is nice for me since I use Blender, but I think there should be a global default that would apply to all models.

Unity uses different Scale factor when importing from different files (fbx, 3ds, mb, and so on). I believe it's implemented this way to compensate differences between 3d modelling tools. We probably would implement in a different way next time:) but we keep it for backwards-compatibility for now...

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/4757/import-settings - worked perfectly for me and no more .01 scaling on import. Btw, I also set all units (Unit Scale) to Meters in Max, and UNCHECKED "Respect System Units in Files" in Units Setup->System Unit Setup.

I want to add my 2 cent on this. Maybe I am wrong but I think it was done thinking of 1cm as the usual modeling scale. This is good for animated meshes but not for prefabs for levels. And usually prefabs are MANY MORE than animated meshes, so it would make more sense to use a 1:1 scale. Also, it would be nice to have a preferences setting about this thing also on per-project preferences maybe on Unity3. Preferences panels should be enhanced a lot IMHO.