I have a mixed feeling with this so far as I entcountered some problems. See my following thread:
But yeah you are absolute right that Salome has a strong mesher itself and can do all the stuff you want. On the other hand you need to import all the additional informations that you can use the graphical selection method in PPM e.g. surfaces for BCs. This could be a little bit messy in bigger models with many contact surfaces and so on.