Not sure what to say to that, other than to try and restate the problem . . .
I'm Unity 4.5.3, and when I turn off handles in the NGUI options, every object that has a Widget (generally a UISprite or a UILabel in my case) refuses to draw the standard transform move gizmo. It will display the standard transform rotate gizmo, and it will display the standard transform scale gizmo, but the standard transform move gizmo does not display at all.
Here are some images to illustrate the problem better, in case I'm just doing a bad job explaining it. Probably I'm just being clueless about some aspect of how this is supposed to work, but at the moment I cannot see a way to move multiple widgets at once if I cannot access the move tool gizmo.
Object (UISprite) with handles turned on, move tool selected:

Same object with handles turned off, rotate tool selected, and standard transform rotate gizmo displaying correctly at local origin:

Same object with handles turned off, move tool selected, and standard transform move gizmo nowhere to be seen:
